As assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush and staying on under the Clinton administration, Diane Ravitch has served in many influential roles in contemporary education policy. But it is her column “Bridging Differences” with MacArthur fellow and colleague Deborah Meier, in Education Week that I first became aware of her work. She would thrust and parry with the most complex topics in education, always ready with a quip or to bring a smile.
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Dana Scott Brown has been prolific in architecture and planning, as well as theoretical writing and teaching. In her work, she strives to understand a building or a city in terms of social, economic and cultural perspectives, viewing each as a set of complex systems. Her work brought emerging post-modern ideas to contemporary forms beginning in the mid-1960s. She’s been faculty at Berkeley, UCLA, Yale, and Harvard and her highly regarded firm, Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, has designed the Seattle Art Museum, a massive wing of London’s National Gallery, San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as numerous buildings across university campuses and municipalities. She has collaborated with Robert Venturi since 1962 as partners in architecture and marriage, though he alone received the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1991.
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In the late 60s, Dennis Kitchen and his Kitchen Sink Press were at the epicenter of the underground comix revolution. Sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll were drawn freely, in direct opposition to the Comic Code Authority censors. I forgive Mr. Kitchen the curmudgeonly tone, for all the great work he did to liberate minds like my own from stagnant ways of thinking.
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I came across educational historian David Tyack’s book Tinkering Toward Utopia (1995) almost by accident on the sale rack of a college bookstore, but only a few pages in, I began to devour it. As an elementary classroom teacher, I was immediately aware of a shift in analytical perspective: for once the role of the teacher was central to the historical analysis of our educational system. Tyack’s work starts with The One Best System (1974), analyzing the “organizational revolution that took place in American school during the last century” (1870-1970), where schools moved from individual village schools to a unified urban context. This analysis is a massive undertaking, but Tyack has a steady hand and a searching mind. Though Tinkering Toward Utopia (1995) comes decades later, it is, for me, the best, containing analysis of the history of 100 years of school reform efforts in America, succinctly and devastatingly presented.
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I was a teenager when I came across Eraserhead on a late-night movie show. Then came Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks and Mullholland Drive among many others. Lynch’s warped psycho-sexual mysteries were my favorite. Now that I’m older, I’m aware that in order to create such twisted visual experiences, the artist has to dive deeply into the themes of their work, ruminate on them, even inhabit their unease and fear. David Lynch’s question for others is exactly the question I would want to ask him myself.
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There was a time I fantasized that Dave Eggers and I could be friends. More: I think like many I wanted to be Dave Eggers. His first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) led the way for a literary career that includes both the hilarious and earnest; he founded 826, a group of nonprofit writing centers, McSweeney’s, a hilarious quarterly journal and publishing imprint, Voice of Witness a human rights nonprofit, and a number of his books feature those that live invisibly at the margins in American society: Sudanese refugees, Syrian- and Yemeni-Americans, etc. Someday he’ll win the MacArthur genius award, and we’ll never had even had a chance to grab a beer.
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Dave Barry’s dry wit made a big impression on me in high school. Later, in college, when preparing to move to Japan, I picked up Dave Barry Does Japan (1992). Turns out throughout all his zany humorizing, there was a lot for me to chew on. I wasn’t the only one, in 1988 at the Miami Herald, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his “consistently effective use of humor as a device for presenting fresh insights into serious concerns.”
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Daniel Ho is practically a one-man force in contemporary Hawaiian music. He won 4 Grammy awards in a row for the Best Hawaiian Music Album (2007-2010). My cousin, Loretta, caught up with him at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) in Los Angeles to ask him this question.
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With a huge, untamed beard and a deeply penetrating stare, Daniel Higgs cuts a very memorable portrait. He is an artist’s artist: a mysterious, mystical sort who has been the lead singer of the seminal post-punk band Lungfish, a legendary tattoo artist, published poet, and has many books of his drawings and artworks. With such a wide-ranging curiosity as a theme in his work, I found it surprising he didn’t have a question to share.
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Contacting Dr. Scott was a suggestion from my math-whiz friend Peter after I asked who he considered to be the Great Mathematicians of our times. Dana S. Scott has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Stanford and Oxford. He won the Turing Award (1976). I cannot sum up well what he has accomplished, so I have had to resort to Wikipedia which describes Dr. Scott as: “Internationally recognized mathematical logician whose work has spanned computer science, mathematics, and philosophy. He made seminal contributions to automata theory, modal logic, model theory, set theory, and the theory of programming languages.”
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