MacArthur 'Geniuses' On On Point

The MacArthur Foundation Fellowships (better known as the MacArthur Genius Awards) were announced this week and On Point is pleased to see several past guests on this year's list of winners.

In 2008, we spoke with poet Kay Ryan, then the nation's poet laureate. In awarding her the grant, the Foundation noted that her "distinctive and tightly woven verse is grounded in incisive explorations of seemingly familiar language, ideas, and experiences."

New Yorker writer Peter Hessler joined us in 2006 to talk about modern China. The Foundation noted this week that Hessler "writes with a novelist's attention to detail and structures his stories around the compelling characters he encounters."

Roland Fryer talked with us about economics and the black experience in 2005. The MacArthur Foundation this week noted that Fryer "has opened up a range of topics to quantitative analysis, offering new insights on such issues as the cognitive underpinnings of racial discrimination, labor market inequalities, and, in particular, the educational trajectory of minority children."