This story includes this line, delivered without obvious consciousness of irony:

"The foundation maintains that winners are never chosen for any political reasons..."

Here's the complete list of winners. I stopped looking them up after awhile:

●Matthew Aucoin, 28, a composer and conductor with the American Modern Opera Company/Los Angeles Opera
●Julie Ault, 60, an artist and curator in New York City. [for ""redefining the role of the artwork and the artist by melding artistic, curatorial, archival, editorial, and activist practices into a new form of cultural production."]
●William J. Barber II, 55, a pastor and social justice advocate with Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, N.C.
●Clifford Brangwynne, 40, a biophysical engineer at Princeton University.
●Natalie Diaz, 40, a poet who teaches at Arizona State University. [a "Mojave American poet, language activist, and educator".]
●Livia S. Eberlin, 32, an analytical chemist at the University of Texas in Austin.
●Deborah Estrin, 58, a computer scientist at Cornell Tech.
●Amy Finkelstein, 44, a health economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[dunno why this formatting is messed up sry]

• ●Gregg Gonsalves, 54, an epidemiologist and global health advocate at Yale University. [epidemiologist and global health advocate at Yale University who spent nearly three decades as an HIV/AIDS activist.]
• Vijay Gupta, 31, a violinist and social justice advocate with the Los Angeles Philharmonic/Street Symphony.
• ●Becca Heller, 36, a human rights lawyer with the International Refugee Assistance Project.

●Raj Jayadev, 43, a community organizer and co-founder of Silicon Valley De-Bug.
●Titus Kaphar, 42, a painter in New Haven, Conn.
●John Keene, 53, a writer in the Department of African American and African Studies at Rutgers University.
●Kelly Link, 49, a fiction writer in Northampton, Mass.
●Dominique Morisseau, 40, a playwright at Signature Theatre in New York City.
●Okwui Okpokwasili, 46, a choreographer and performer in New York City.
●Kristina Olson, 37, a psychologist [studying "transgender" children] at the University of Washington.
●Lisa Parks, 51, a media scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
●Rebecca Sandefur, 47, a sociologist and legal scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
●Allan Sly, 36, a mathematician at Princeton University.
●Sarah T. Stewart, 45, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Davis.
●Wu Tsang, 36, a filmmaker and performance artist in New York City.
●Doris Tsao, 42, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology.
●Ken Ward Jr., 50, an investigative journalist with the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

And:

Other 2018 fellows have made their art a conduit for social activism — like Vijay Gupta, 31, a violinist and social justice advocate who provides musical enrichment to the homeless, incarcerated and others in Los Angeles; Natalie Diaz, 40, a poet at Arizona State University whose works explores the lingering impact of violence and oppression in the lives of indigenous Americans; and Okwui Okpokwasili, 46, a choreographer and performance artist whose pieces combine storytelling, music and movement to convey the stories of African and African American women.

The MacArthur grants are a pretty cool thing...but they're not only political, they're almost entirely political. The PC left is so deep in its own echo chamber that it has forgotten there's a world outside it.