DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: June 8, 2025

Artist Of The Week: Sebastiao Salgado.  Never have I seen such incredible photography, imbued with such deep humanism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QgUFh27ryU

A profound artist who led a meaningful life.  Please watch. You’ll be blown away.

You’re A Genius.  So what?:

Who has the highest IQ in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever. Her name, appropriately enough, was Marilyn vos Savant. And she was, by the most common yardstick, a genius.

Vos Savant hasn’t made any scientific breakthroughs or created a masterpiece. She graduated 178th in her high-school class of 613, according to a 1989 profile in New York magazine. She married at 16, had two children by 19, became a stay-at-home mother, and was divorced in her 20s. She tried to study philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, but did not graduate. She married again and was divorced again at 35. She became a puzzle enthusiast, joined a high-IQ society, and occasionally wrote an essay or a satirical piece under a pen name for a newspaper. Mostly, she devoted herself to raising her boys.

That all changed in 1985, when The Guinness Book of World Records published her childhood IQ score. How its authors obtained the record is murky: An acquaintance once told the Financial Times that he’d urged her to submit her result as a way of making her famous.

Thanks to all the publicity, vos Savant met her third husband, Robert Jarvik, who had developed a pioneering model of an artificial heart. Jarvik had his own story of being overlooked: Before ultimately enrolling in medical school at the University of Utah, he had been rejected by 15 other institutions. He tracked down vos Savant after seeing her on the cover of an airline magazine, and she agreed to a date after finding a picture of him taken by Annie Leibovitz. They quickly became an item, and eventually took up residence in New York.

At their 1987 wedding, the rings were made of gold and pyrolytic carbon, a material used in Jarvik’s artificial heart. The science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov gave away the bride. A news report has them telling their guests that they were relieved to meet each other, because they found most people difficult to talk to—the implication being that mere mortals were not on their wavelength. The honeymoon would be spent in Paris, they revealed; vos Savant would write a screenplay for a futuristic satire, and Jarvik would continue researching his “grand unification theory” of physics. Yet despite their superior brains, vos Savant’s screenplay was never made into a film, and Jarvik—who, according to a New York profile of the couple, thought the Big Bang theory was “wrong” and the theory of relativity was “probably wrong”—did not revolutionize physics.

Has this piqued your interest?  Keep reading.  However, I’ll cut to the chase:

Vos Savant, who is now 78, made a career of being the smartest person alive, because she had a number to prove it. Once she was hailed as a genius, vos Savant was one. Nothing about her changed, but her life did. As big a brain as Stephen Hawking had little time for this kind of thinking. In a 2004 Q&A with The New York Times Magazine, the physicist was asked what his IQ was. “I have no idea,” he replied. “People who boast about their IQ are losers.”

A Conversation With Orville Peck.  We saw him in concert in Bend, Oregon.  He was incredible.  We’re gonna see him in the Broadway production of Cabaret at the end of the month.  It’s almost certainly the only time we’ll see him without a mask.

The River That Came Back To Life:

Bill Cross pulled his truck to the side of a dusty mountain road and jumped out to scan a stretch of rapids rippling through the hillsides below.

As an expert and a guide, Cross had spent more than 40 years boating the Klamath River, etching its turns, drops and eddies into his memory. But this run was brand new. On a warm day in mid-May, he would be one of the very first to raft it with high spring flows.

Last year, the final of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River were removed in the largest project of its kind in US history. Forged through the footprint of reservoirs that kept parts of the Klamath submerged for more than a century, the river that straddles the California-Oregon border has since been reborn.

The dam removal marked the end of a decades-long campaign led by the Yurok, Karuk and Klamath tribes, along with a wide range of environmental NGOs and fishing advocacy groups, to convince owner PacifiCorp to let go of the ageing infrastructure. The immense undertaking also required buy-in from regulatory agencies, state and local governments, businesses and the communities that used to live along the shores of the bygone lakes.

Looking To Travel In Architectural Splendor?  Howzabout an Airsteam inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright?:

Pielage calls the forms created by shadows “light art.” Capturing this in Wright homes is often his primary goal.  Photo: Andrew Pielage

When Wright arrived in the Sonoran Desert in December of 1937, he made two purchases. First, 600 acres of land, on which Taliesin West would eventually sit. Then, shortly after, a handful of tents for his apprentices to sleep in while they helped build the new property. Even once construction finished, it became a tradition that his disciples would build temporary shelters among the cacti, bushes, and sandy soil. “This was a camp, and Wright was moved by the way canvas from the tents diffused light. That’s what inspired the canvas roofs on Taliesin West today,” Sally Russel, the director of licensing at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, said at a press briefing at Taliesin West about the trailer.

Coincidentally, Airstream’s founder, Wally Byam, began designing trailers for people who didn’t like sleeping on the ground in tents—a sect his first wife belonged to. Nearly 100 years later, the Usonian trailer lets owners enjoy the desert (or any part of the world) Wright-style, while still taking advantage of modern comforts like a bed, shower, and kitchen. “I’ve been dropping the idea of a Frank Lloyd Wright trailer into the thought mill at Airstream for about 20 years,” Bob Wheeler, the president and CEO of Airstream, said at the briefing.

Let’s let Orville Peck sing us out: