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From W be easy Chicago this is internet. 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.

It is an. ramps.

It is an amazing list of super smart people, including two of my favorite authors, N. Jemison and Jacqueline Woodson.

The list also includes an artist and a playwright and a filmmaker.

There are people who work in fields like econometrics, whatever that is,

genetics, neuroscience, chemical engineering, environmental health, and cellular biology.

Today we are going to talk to a newly named genius.

Her name is Mary L. Gray, and she's an anthropologist and a media scholar

who looks at how labor and identity and human rights are

transformed by technology. What does that mean you ask? Well the short

version is she's a huge nerd. The slightly less short version is that she has written one book about how big

tech companies use an underpaid exploited underclass to make the apps we love so easy to use.

And she wrote another book that leans on her own personal

backstory to research another underrepresented group,

which is queer people living in rural America.

...