Here Are This Year's MacArthur Geniuses

The MacArthur Foundation has announced its 2023 list of 20 "geniuses" who will receive grants of $800,000 over the next five years to spend any way they choose. The winners—12 women, seven men, and one nonbinary person—include writers, artists, and scientists, the Washington Post reports.

• Among the winners, which the Chicago-based foundation calls "fellows," is Ada Limon, who was recently appointed to a second term as the national poet laureate. She says she missed calls from an unknown number the day after her grandmother died and called back after getting an email from the foundation. "I felt like losing the matriarch of my family and then receiving this, it felt like it was a gift from her in some ways," she tells the AP.

• Linsey Marr, an aerosols expert and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, helped determine that initial transmission models were wrong and COVID-19 is spread through the air, a finding that changed public health guidance and likely saved many lives, NPR reports.
• Patrick Makuakane, a Hawaiian-born cultural preservationist and master teacher of the dance art of hula, tells the Post he thinks of the grant "as an award for hula, because a lot of people have no idea what it is. They think it's a simple-minded dance done in a grass skirt. But it has really profound effects on many people I know. For many of us, hula is life."
• Courtney Bryan, a composer and professor of music at Tulane University in New Orleans, tells the New York Times that she is looking into ways to use the money to help musicians in the city.

• Another New Orleans winner, incarceration law scholar Andrea Armstrong, was honored for "bringing much-needed transparency to incarceration practices in the United States," the foundation says.
• Ian Bassin co-founded the Protect Democracy group, a nonpartisan organization that works to protect elections and keep American democracy resilient. "This fellowship feels both like a tremendous opportunity, but also a responsibility because the work of protecting and perfecting our democracy is far from complete," he tells the AP.
• Anthropologist Amber Wutich was recognized for her work showing how informal economies and social networks developed in communities worldwide that are experiencing water insecurity. She tells NPR that when she got the call about the award, she was only allowed to tell one other person. She called doctoral mentor Russ Bernard, who said, "My first advice to you is to never refer to yourself as a genius."
• A full list of winners can be seen on the foundation's website here.

(More MacArthur Grant stories.)