Robert Kanigel was born on May 28, 1946, in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Stuyvesant High School and received an engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1966. He worked as an engineer in Baltimore, Maryland, until 1969, when he quit his job to spend a year living in Paris and travelling Europe. During this year, Kanigel decided to become a writer. He lived in San Francisco from 1971 to 1974, before returning to Baltimore, where he wrote freelance until 1999, especially for Johns Hopkins Magazine and a variety of Jewish publications. His first published book was Apprentice to Genius (Macmillan, 1986), about the role of mentorship among scientists. After that, he transitioned to writing primarily long-form essays and monographs. Beginning in the 1980s, Kanigel taught writing classes, first in the evening school of Johns Hopkins University, then in the University of Baltimore's Yale Gordon College of Liberal Arts. In 1999, he accepted a position as professor of science writing at MIT, where he helped start its Graduate Program in Science Writing, which he directed for seven years. In 2011, Kanigel retired from MIT to write full time again, and moved back to Baltimore with his wife, Sarah.

Sources:

Kanigel, Robert, Robert Kanigel, https://www.robertkanigel.com/. Accessed 2024 February 23.

“Robert Kanigel,” Wikipedia, 2023 November 15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kanigel

The Blasket Islands (Na Blascaodaí) are an uninhabited group of islands off the west coast of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, Ireland. The last of the islands to hold a significant population, Great Blasket Island, was abandoned in 1954 due to population decline. Because the island population was exclusively Irish-speaking and many islanders were illiterate, they were the subject of much anthropological and linguistic study around the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, particularly from writers and linguists such as Robin Flower, Carl Marstrander, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, J.M. Synge, and George Derwent Thomson. The scholars recorded native stories and poems, wrote of their own experiences, and encouraged the locals to record theirs, resulting in an outsized body of published literature from an island population that peaked at around 175 people.

Sources:

“Blasket Islands”, Wikipedia, 2024 January 16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasket_Islands

Kanigel, Robert, “On an Irish Island,” Robert Kanigel, https://www.robertkanigel.com/on_an_irish_island_108131.htm. Accessed 2024 February 23.

Jane Jacobs (née Butzner) was born on May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the daughter of John Butzner, a physician, and Bess Robison Butzner. After graduating from Scranton's Central High School, Jacobs briefly trained to become a stenographer before taking a position as a reporter with the Scranton Tribune. In 1938, she moved to New York City and attended Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years. In the years that followed, she held a number of writing and editing jobs. In 1944, she married Robert Hyde Jacobs, Jr., an architect, with whom she had three children: James Kedzie (1948), Edward Decker (1950), and Mary Hyde (1955).

In 1952, Jacobs became an associate editor at Architectural Forum magazine, where she was introduced to the topics of city planning and rebuilding. She wrote a book sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation that focused on American cities: The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in 1961 and went on to become Jacobs's most well-known book. In addition to her writing, Jacobs was also an activist. She was arrested in 1968 after she disrupted a public meeting about the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a project she opposed.

Jacobs moved to Toronto with her family in 1969 in part due to her objection to the Vietnam War. She quickly became an influential figure in Toronto and soon after her arrival helped to stop plans for the construction of the Spadina Expressway. Jacobs became a Canadian citizen in 1974. She continued to write on topics including urban issues, Canadian cities and sovereignty, and economics. Jacobs was nominated to the Order of Canada in 1996 for her work on urban development. Her last book, Dark Age Ahead, was published in 2004. Jane Jacobs died on April 25, 2006, in Toronto.

Sources:

Allen, Max, ed. Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs. Ontario: Ginger Press, 1997.

Jacobs, Jane. Architect's Journal. November 22, 1961.

"Jane Jacobs." In Contemporary Authors Online. Accessed 2006.