Humanities in the Village | The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius

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Who gets to be a genius? Who pays a price for it? And where does creative inspiration come from in the first place? The December edition of Humanities in the Village addresses these questions and more, featuring Patchen Barss, author of The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius. William Egginton, director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, will join Barss in conversation.

Both erudite and poetic, The Impossible Man draws on years of research and interviews, as well as previously unopened archives to present a moving portrait of Penrose the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Roger the human being. It reveals not just the extraordinary life of Roger Penrose, but asks who gets to be a genius, and who makes the sacrifices that allow one man to be one.

Humanities in the Village is an event series in partnership between the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University and Bird in Hand bookstore, which aims to make scholarship publicly accessible. There will be an audience Q&A after the reading—all are welcome. And while you're there, pick up some recommended titles from Bird in Hand and enjoy the offerings of nighttime beverages.

Patchen Barss is a Toronto-based science journalist, author, and speaker. His upcoming biography, The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius, will be published in November 2024. He was the 2021-22 Sloan biography fellow at CUNY's Graduate Center.

As a writer and editor Barss has contributed to Nautilus Magazine, Scientific American, the BBC, PBS, and The Walrus as well as the National Post, Toronto Star, and Montreal Gazette. He has been a producer at CBC Television and the Discovery Channel and is the former head of research and development for the documentary film company CineNova. He spent seven years as the director of communications at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

In 2018, OwlKids published Barss's first book for children, Flow Spin Grow: Looking for Patterns in Nature. In 2010, he published The Erotic Engine: How Pornography Powered Mass Communications, from Gutenberg to Google (Random House).

Barss has worked with the consulting firm Lord Cultural Resources to develop major museums and exhibitions around the world, including the Perlan Museum of Icelandic Natural Wonders in Reykjavik and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor. He has also worked extensively in the university sector, producing events, building media partnerships, training scientists in public speaking and writing, and developing strategic communications initiatives designed to provide the public with access to emerging ideas in science and the humanities.

William Egginton is a professor in the humanities, chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher's Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (2016), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018), and The Rigor of Angels (2023), which was named to several best of 2023 lists, including The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is coauthor with David Castillo of Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature (2022). His latest book, on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, was published in January 2024.