Esperanza Spalding Took on Bieber, Now Takes on Jazz

In 2011, [Esperanza] Spalding found herself onstage and on millions of television screens, collecting a Grammy Award in the Best New Artist category (and sending fans of pop post-teen sensation Justin Bieber, who lost out, into irate Twitter rants).

Her youth and beauty and progressive fashion-she accepted her Grammy in a deconstructed citron chiffon dress and a very intentional afro coaxed into a pompadour-were also an undeniable part of her appeal. Village Voice music critic Greg Tate calls Spalding the “sexiest and best thing to happen to jazz since Wynton.” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo by: Ethan Hill

Ed note: The inspirational winners of our first annual American Ingenuity Awards.

“Higher Education Should Be A Basic Human Right” - Sebastian Thrun

This is the headquarters of Udacity, billed as the “21st-century university,” where [Sebastian] Thrun is taking his next big crack at the next big problem: education. While he still spends a day a week at Google, where he is a fellow, and remains an unpaid research professor at Stanford University (his wife, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, is a professor in comparative literature), Udacity is the place the 45-year-old, German-born roboticist calls home.

Udacity has its roots in the experience Thrun had in 2011 when he and Peter Norvig opened the course they were teaching at Stanford, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,” to the world via the Internet. “I was shocked by the number of responses,” he says. The class made the New York Times a few months later, and enrollment surged from 58,000 to 160,000. “I remember going to a Lady Gaga concert at the time and thinking, ‘I have more students in my class than you do in your concert,’ ” Thrun says. But it wasn’t just numbers, it was who was taking the class: “People wrote me these heartbreaking e-mails by the thousands. They were people from all walks of life—business people, high-school kids, retired people, people on dialysis.” Thrun, whose demeanor is a blend of continental sang-froid and Silicon Valley sunniness (he peppers the precise speech you might expect from a German roboticist with intensifiers like “super” and “insanely”), had a moment: “I realized, ‘Wow, I’m reaching people that really need my help.’ ” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo by: Ethan Hill / Composite Image: NASA; Google; Udacity

Ed note: Our American Ingenuity Awards page features many more inspirational people.

Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society

Bryan Stevenson’s effort began with detailed research: Among more than 2,000 juveniles (age 17 or younger) who had been sentenced to life in prison without parole, he and staff members at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the nonprofit law firm he established in 1989, documented 73 involving defendants as young as 13 and 14. Children of color, he found, tended to be sentenced more harshly.

“The data made clear that the criminal justice system was not protecting children, as is done in every other area of law,” he says. So he began developing legal arguments “that these condemned children were still children.” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photograph by: Steve Liss

Ed note: Our American Ingenuity Awards page has more on Bryan Stevenson and the other inspirational winners.

The December issue of Smithsonian introduces the American Ingenuity Awards. dream hampton profiles Grammy Award winner Esperanza Spalding. Abigail Tucker on the high school sophomore who invented a new way to test for a deadly form of cancer and how one legal crusader is giving young people in America’s prisons a second chance.