What To Do With $500,000 Grant?

By: Greg Mitchell What do you do if you are a prize-winning journalist known for writing vivid articles about the poor and you win a $500,000 "genius" grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation?

This happened to Katherine "Kate" Boo, 38, a staff writer for The Washington Post, last week. Speaking to the Post about her response, she cited, "the guilt, the discontinuity, the sort of sick irony." Prizes, she added, "puff us up as writers but leave the situation that we are writing about more or less unchanged. That's pretty depressing."

But relief is on the way. The grant, she said, "is like being hooked up to a 500-milligram Prozac drip."