Surprise! You’re A Genius
Nerdette Recaps With Peter Sagal
WBEZ
4.6 • 924 Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2020
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You didn’t already know?
Nerdette talked with two brand new MacArthur Fellows — also known as MacArthur “geniuses” — about the important work they’re doing and what it’s like to get that phone call.
Mary L. Gray is an anthropologist and a media scholar honored for her work investigating how “labor, identity, and human rights are transformed by the digital economy.”
And Damien Fair is a cognitive neuroscientist honored for his research on the developing human brain.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still |
| 0:06.1 | watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you, |
| 0:12.7 | soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making, |
| 0:18.0 | Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago. |
| 0:25.7 | Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure. |
| 0:28.3 | Listen, wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:35.2 | From WBEZ Chicago, this is Nerdette. |
| 0:55.8 | I'm Greta Johnson, and the Oscars may have been pushed even farther into next year, but I declare this time right now to be award season. The Nobel Prizes have just been announced and the National Book Awards are right around the corner and we learned last week about the 21 people who won MacArthur Fellowships, which are also known as Genius Grants. |
| 1:04.4 | It is an amazing list of super smart people, including two of my favorite authors, N.K. Jemison and Jacqueline Woodson. The list also includes an artist and a playwright and a filmmaker. |
| 1:09.8 | There are people who work in fields like |
| 1:11.3 | econometrics, whatever that is, genetics, neuroscience, chemical engineering, environmental |
| 1:16.1 | health, and cellular biology. Today, we are going to talk to a newly named genius. Her |
| 1:22.7 | name is Mary L. Gray, and she's an anthropologist and a media scholar who looks at how labor and identity |
| 1:28.7 | and human rights are transformed by technology. What does that mean, you ask? Well, the short |
| 1:34.7 | version is she's a huge nerd. The slightly less short version is that she's written one book about |
| 1:40.6 | how big tech companies use an underpaid, exploited underclass to make the apps |
| 1:46.2 | we love so easy to use. And she wrote another book that leans on her own personal backstory to |
| 1:52.4 | research another underrepresented group, which is queer people living in rural America. |
| 1:57.8 | Most recently, her research has focused on the coronavirus pandemic, specifically how what we may |
| 2:03.5 | consider to be tech solutions, like how your phone could help you with contact tracing, |
| 2:08.7 | are actually contributing to health disparities and systemic racism simply because they often |
| 2:14.8 | ignore the groups who most need help. Mary Gray is with me now to talk about all of that. Mary, |
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