MacArthur Fellow

Gimbling in the Wabe – It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Gene Luen Yang!

Okay, I have to admit, I find last week’s announcement of the 2016 MacArthur Fellows (and their subsequent awarding of the generous – to the tune of $625,000-no-strings-attached generous – Genius Grants) to be incredibly exciting. One expects microbiologists, computer scientists, human rights lawyers, chemists, and the like to be […]

Six Diverse Writers Are Named 2016 MacArthur Fellows

Poet Claudine Rankine, writer Maggie Nelson, artist and writer Lauren Redniss, “long form” journalist Sarah Stillman, graphic novelist and comic book writer Gene Luen Yang, and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins were named as 2016 MacArthur Fellows (along with 17 other “extraordinary individuals” in such diverse disciplines as linguistics, microbiology, computer science, […]

Birthdays

On this day, August 6, in 1809, Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland from 1850 to 1892 (the longest anyone has held that position), he is well known for such iconic works as The Charge of the Light Brigade and Idylls of the King, and for such quotable phrases as “‘Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all” and “Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to do and die”. He himself died in 1892 at age 83 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Birthdays

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.