1 . The concept of an art museum is easy enough: that is about art. There are those rare museums focused largely or entirely on the work of just one person. Those senses can be all the richer when you know the museum is the artist’s birthplace or onetime home. Here are four examples of such museums.

The name Cyrus E. Dallin (1861-1944) might not be familiar, but several of the sculptor’s works are. His “Appeal to the Great Spirit”, an example of the many sculptures Dallin made relating to Native Americans, stands in front of the Museum of Fine Arts. Born in Utah, he lived in Arlington (Texas) for the final four decades of his life.

Rockwell (1894-1978) moved to Stockbridge in 1953. By then he was already America’s best-known illustrator (插图画家). The museum, founded in 1969, moved into its present, Robert A. M. Stern-designed building in 1993. Its 998 paintings and drawings are the largest single collection of Rockwell’s art.

Kids 6 and under FREE, adults $20, students with ID: $10

Edward Gorey (1925-2000) was an artist, yes, but he was other things as well: author, playwright, set and costume designer. Gorey purchased this 18th-century house in 1979 and lived there the rest of his life. The house currently serves as a museum celebrating Gorey’s life and work. It’s also known as the Elephant House. That’s appropriate, in light of Gorey’s passion for animal welfare.

Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) is responsible for what may well be the most familiar work of any American artist. His portrait of George Washington is the basis of the first president’s image on the dollar bill. As one of the early Republic’s most distinguished artists, Stuart painted more than a thousand portraits over the course of his career.

2 . Godfrey Hounsfield’s early life did not suggest that he would accomplish much at all. He was not a particularly good student in the teachers’ eyes—he neither observed the school disciplines nor worked hard enough at school lessons. His teachers described him as “thick”.

He joined the army during the Second World War, but he wasn’t much of a soldier. However, he was a wizard with electrical machinery—he would use the newly invented radar to help pilots better find their way home on dark, cloudy nights.

After the war, Hounsfield followed his commander’s advice and got a degree in engineering He practiced his trade at EMI, a company with a focus on electronics and electrical engineering.

Hounsfield’s natural talent for engineering made him lead the team building the most advanced mainframe computer available in Britain. But by the 1960’s, EMI wanted out of the competitive computer market and the brilliant engineer wasn’t sure what to do in the future in the company. Therefore, the company gave Hounsfield a long holiday.

During the holiday, Hounsfield met a physician who complained about the poor quality of X-ray of the brain, which looked like fog. This got Hounsfield to make a move into the new field.

Hounsfield returned to EMI and talked about the idea with his boss. Then he used a new way to appoach the problem of imaging what was inside the skull. By working backward and using the fastest computers, he could work on the mystery of each brain layer. But there was a problem: EMI wasn’t involved in the medical market then. The company allowed Hounsfield to work on his product, but provided no funding.

Luckily his boss, Bill Ingham, saw the value of Hounsfield’s proposal and struggled to ask EMI to keep the project run. Finally, Hounsfield built a safe and effictive human scanner.

Hounsfield’s innovation transformed medicine. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1979 and was knighted by the queen in 1981. He continued his invention career until his final days in 2004, when he died at 84.

5 . If there’s such a person as a young STEM icon, Gitanjali Rao, who’s now 18, is the one.

In April 2014, the city of Flint disconnected from Detroit’s water line as a cost-cutting measure and began to draw water from the Flint River. Soon after, shockingly high levels of lead (铅) were found in the city’s water supply. It took several years, during which residents including children were showing up with mysterious rashes (皮疹) and other illnesses, before national attention to the crisis forced the city to admit it had a problem.

When she learned about the crisis, Gitanjali Rao was troubled enough to do something. “I was shocked by the number of people affected by lead pollution in water and I wanted to do something to change this,” she said. Inspiration really struck her after she watched her engineer parents test for lead in their own tap water. She decided to build a lead-detecting device that would be easy and affordable for anyone to use. In 2017, she developed a device called Tethys. It won her the title “America’s Top Young Scientist” in the 3M Young Scientist Challenge. Marvel even created a superhero, Genius Gitanjali, which celebrates her work on clean water.

In the meantime, Rao had been working on solutions to other issues she cared about. She started developing Epione, a device that tests protein in body fluid samples to detect opioid (阿片类药物) use disorder, in 2018. “Many people need opioids for their pain management and end up with serious addictions,” she said. “Physicians don’t have any easy tools to diagnose opioid addiction at an early stage.”

Additionally, Rao launched an AI-based, anti-cyber bullying app called Kindly in May, 2020. “You type in a sentence, and it’s able to pick a word or phrase out if it’s bullying, and it gives you the option to edit it,” said Rao. “As a teenager, I know teenagers tend to lash out sometimes. The app gives you the chance to rethink what you’re saying so that you know what to do next time around.”

Hailey Scheinman, a 15-year-old girl who met Rao through Marvel’s Hero Project that spotlights youth making an impact on their communities, admires how Rao promotes kindness through science. “Usually people tend toward one part of the brain, the logic piece or the scientific piece. Then there’s the emotional or the creative piece. I’ve learned from her to bring those two together,” says Scheinman.

For most of her life, Suanne Laqueur’s passion for storytelling was shown on the dance floor.

Although Laqueur began writing at a young age, dancing always took center stage. She majored in dance and theater at Alfred University and taught at her mother’s dance studio in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, for years. But when her mother was ready to retire and an opportunity opened for Laqueur to take over the studio, she realized she had no interest in taking on the business side of her art: “Owning a studio is a lot of work — financially, logistically. I love the teaching, the choreographing (编舞), the staging, but I didn’t want to own it.”

Yet Laqueur’s disinterest in running the studio changed when she became a self-published author. In the fall of 2013, she decided to pursue self-publishing as a way of sharing her first completed novel with friends and family. During the process, she realized that following her true passion-telling stories through writing — made the business of the art worthwhile, and owning that business meant she could direct her writing career however she chose.   

Starting with her second self-published novel, she began investing more time in marketing and building her audience. Her investment paid off. Since 2014, Laqueur, now 49, has self-published six novels, which collectively have hundreds of ratings and reviews on Goodreads. Gradually, readers pay more attention to her works. In particular, her 2016 novel An Exaltation of Larks stole the show and won the grand prize at the 25th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards, topping more than 2, 300 entries.

“You have to write the most truthful story to you, and I think self-publishing allows that freedom,” she says, “If you work with traditional publishing, it’s more about what’s marketable. There are trade-offs, which everyone will tell you, but by self-publishing I have control of the book, I have control of the story, and I’m cool with that.”

7 . Packing up her bedroom in Virgin a Beach, Douglas had to say goodbye to her family, to her two dogs, and to the beach, where she loved to ride waves on her boogie board. But it was time to take the leap, however, heartbreaking and awkward it would be. Even at 14, Douglas knew that.

So off she went about 1.200 miles to West Des Moines, Iowa, to train with a coach from China and live with a white family she had never been met. When she arrived,\Douglas thought that she must be the only black person in the state.

“I was unpacking and saying, ‘What am I doing?’”said Douglas, who is 16.“it was like:’Where do I put everything? Where are the spoons?’ I’d wake up and say, ‘This is my bed, where am I?’”

Liang Chow, who had coached the Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson, transformed Douglas into one of the best gymnasts in the world, helping her skyrocket from an average member of the national team to the top of the sport. And a couple with four young daughters became her second family, nurturing her in low a while her real family|supported her from afar,(遥远地).

That move also was important in Douglas’s making history. By winning the Olympic all-round title, she became the first black woman to do so. She also became the fourth American woman to win the all-round, following Mary Lou Rettonjin 1984, Carly Patternson in 2004 and Nastia Liukin in 2008.

Douglas won, scoring 62.232 points, and led the competition from beginning to end.’Viktoria Komova, who sobbed into her coach’s chest when she learned she had lost, won the silver, with 61.973 points. Aliya Mustafina. the 2010 world all-round champion, won the bronze with 59.566 points. The other American in the competition, Aly Raisman finished fourth after losing a tiebreaker(决胜局) to Mustafina.

Douglas said she had felt confident all along that she would win.“It was just an amazing feeling,”she said,“I was just like, believe, don’t fear, believe.”

9 . It’s hard to find Alice Munro in the media. Even after she won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Canadian writer just appeared for a quick interview and then dropped out of sight. On Dec 29th, she still didn’t seek the spotlight when she was named one of the five Women of the Year by the Financial Times.

In Munro’s eyes, ordinary lives always hide larger dramas. So she records what we casually think of as the everyday actions of normal people. She often focuses on life in her hometown, a small village in Ontario which she is most familiar with. She writes about the ordinary things in the village —trees in the Ontario wilderness, poor country schools and long last illnesses. Above all, she talks about girls and women who have seemingly ordinary lives but struggle against daily misfortune.

She has a special talent for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary. These are ordinary people, ordinary stories, but she has the magic. Her precise language, depth of detail and the logic of her storytelling have made her stories inviting.

Runaway, one of Munro’s representative works, is a good example of her writing style. One of the stories centers on the life of an ordinary woman Carla, who lives in a small Canadian town with her husband Clark. The story slowly forms a picture of Carla, trapped in a bad marriage, her unhappiness building into desperation until she decides to flee. The story of Carla is a story of the power and betrayals of love. It is about lost children and lost chances that we can all find in life. There is pain beneath the surface, like a needle in the heart.

Since she published her first collection of short stories in 1968, Munro has won many awards, with the Nobel Prize being her biggest honor. On Oct 10th, 2013, the Nobel Prize committee named Munro the “master of the contemporary short story”.