Isidor Feinstein Stone (December 24, 1907 – June 18, 1989) was an American investigative journalist, writer, and author.

Known for his politically progressive views, Stone is best remembered for I. F. Stone's Weekly (1953–1971), a newsletter which the New York University journalism department in 1999 ranked 16th among the top hundred works of journalism in the U.S. in the twentieth century and second place among print journalism publications.

Early life

I. F. Stone was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish Russian immigrants who owned a shop in Haddonfield, New Jersey; the journalist and film critic Judy Stone was his sister.

Stone attended Haddonfield High School. He was ranked 49th in his graduating class of 52 students. His career as a journalist began in his second year of high school, when he founded The Progress newspaper. He later worked for the Haddonfield Press and for the Camden Courier-Post. After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he had studied philosophy, Stone joined The Philadelphia Inquirer, then known as the "Republican Bible of Pennsylvania".

After advice from a newspaper editor in 1937, Stone changed his professional journalistic byline from Isidore Feinstein Stone to I. F. Stone; the editor had told him that his political reportage would be better received if he minimized his Jewish identity. Years later, Stone acknowledged being remorseful about having changed his professional name, thereby yielding to the systemic anti-Semitism then prevalent in American society. Personally, Stone spoke of himself as "Izzy" throughout his life and career.

Politics in the 1930s
Influenced by the social work of Jack London, Stone became a politically radical journalist and joined the Philadelphia Record (the morning edition rival of The Philadelphia Inquirer) owned by J. David Stern, a Democrat. Stone later worked for the New York Post newspaper after Stern bought it during 1929. In late adolescence, Stone joined the Socialist Party of America, a political decision influenced by his reading of the works of Karl Marx, Jack London, Peter Kropotkin and Herbert Spencer. Later, he quit the Socialist Party due to the intractable sectarian divisions, ideological and political, that existed among the organizations that constituted the American Left.

During the 1930s, Stone was an active member of the communist-dominated Popular Front, which opposed Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. On May 1, 1935, Stone joined the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Frank Folsom, Alexander Trachtenberg, Louis Untermeyer, Myra Page, Millen Brand and Arthur Miller.  (Members were largely either Communist Party members or fellow travelers.)

During the 1930s, as a left-wing journalist, Stone criticized Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power in the Soviet Union in an editorial for the New York Post (December 7, 1934) that denounced and likened Stalin's purge and execution of Soviet citizens to the political purges and executions occurring in Nazi Germany (1933–1945) and stated that Stalin's régime in Russia had adopted the tactics of "Fascist thugs and racketeers." As the Moscow Trials (1936–1938) proceeded, Stone attacked Stalin's actions as heralding a new Thermidor, which was the time of counterrevolution and reaction against the French Revolution (1789–1799). Additionally, Stone criticized Lenin and Trotsky for their "cruel and bloody ruthlessness" in executing the Romanov family. He scolded the US Socialist Workers Party, then followers of Trotsky, for believing he would have been less repressive than Stalin.

However, in 1939, following the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, he wrote to a friend that he would do "no more fellow traveling" for the U.S.S.R., and used his opinion column in The Nation magazine to denounce Joseph Stalin as "the Moscow Machiavelli who suddenly found peace as divisible as the Polish plains and marshes". Stone bitterly denounced the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in public and in private as a betrayal of leftist political principles.

Affiliations
A former editor of The Nation, Victor Navasky, said that plain, solid work characterized Stone's investigative journalism. He was an old-school reporter who did his homework and perused public-domain records (official government and private-industry documents) for the facts and figures, the data, and quotations that would substantiate his reportage about the matters of the day.

As a liberal, politically outspoken reporter from the American left wing, Stone often had to work in ideologically hostile environments (military, diplomatic, business) where information was controlled, making verifiability the essence of his journalism, corroborated by facts in the public domain, which the reader could verify. About his style of work as an investigative journalist, Stone said:
I made no claims to 'inside stuff'. I tried to give information which could be documented, so [that] the reader could check it for himself ... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him. ... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own – particularly if he is his own employer – is immune from these [political] pressures.

The journalistic professionalism and integrity of I. F. Stone derived from his intellectual willingness to scour and devour public documents, to bury himself in The Congressional Record, to study the transcripts of obscure congressional committee hearings, debates and reports. He prospected for news nuggets – published as boxed paragraphs in his weekly newsletter – such as contradictions in the line of official policy, examples of bureaucratic mendacity and political obscurantism. Stone especially sought evidence of the U.S. government's legalistic incursions against the civil liberties and the civil and political rights of American citizens.

The New York Post
In 1933, Stone worked as a reporter for the New York Post newspaper. He supported the politics of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933–1945), especially the progressive reforms of the New Deal (1935–1938) programs FDR was instituting to rescue the U.S. economy from the poverty imposed by the Great Depression which started in 1929. In his first book, The Court Disposes (1937), Stone criticized what he described as the politically reactionary role of the U.S. Supreme Court in blocking the realization of the socio-economic reform programs of the New Deal.

In the course of working as publisher and reporter, Stern and Stone quarreled about journalism, its practice and its practices, especially about the content and tone of Stone's New York Post editorials critical of a business plan to refinance the public transit system of New York City. After an acrimonious quarrelling, Stern's concern about Stone's juvenile attitude prompted an inter-office note to Izzy and the managing editor, informing them that, henceforth, the reporter I. F. Stone was part of the news-department staff.

In response to his publisher's management decision – subordinating a reporter to the newsroom managing editor – Stone complained to the Newspaper Guild, presenting his case against the managers of the newspaper for unfair labor practices. The Post contested the case, which proceeded to an arbitration hearing that ruled against the reporter Stone, who consequently quit his job at the New York Post.

The Nation
In 1939, after leaving the New York Post, Stone worked for The Nation, first as associate editor and then as its Washington, D.C., editor. Two years later, in the book Business as Usual: The First Year of Defense (1941), Stone reported on perceived flaws the early stages of America's WW2 preparation. He alleged inefficient planning and execution, and the business-as-usual attitude, of the industrial and business monopolies — and its toleration by the U.S. military — that resulted in the tardy production of matériel for the Arsenal of Democracy with which President F. D. Roosevelt said the U.S. would help Europeans and Asians combat the totalitarianism of National Socialist German Workers Party, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan.

On August 4, 1939, Stone along with four hundred other writers and intellectuals signed a letter condemning anti-Soviet attitudes in the United States, called for better relations between the two countries, described the USSR as a supporter of world peace, and said "The Soviet Union considers political dictatorship a transitional form and has shown a steadily expanding democracy". The letter was published in September 1939 shortly after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was known in the United States and during the same month that the Soviet invasion of Poland began. Upon hearing of the Pact, Stone repudiated the letter and denounced the actions of the Soviet Union and would criticize it and the CPUSA, which repeated the views of the USSR about the war. In return the CPUSA denounced him as one of the leading "Imperialist war-mongers" until Operation Barbarossa which caused a change in communist views of the war."

In the matter of war-production employment, Stone's exposé of alleged institutional racism and anti–Semitism of the FBI's process for vetting job applicants is evident in the semantics of questions meant to discover, identify and exclude political subversives from civil service in the U.S. government. He characterized questions the FBI asked about job applicants as ideological and bigoted, such as, "Does he mix with Negroes?", "Does he ... have too many Jewish friends?", "Does he think the colored races are as good as the white?",  "Why do you suppose he has hired so many Jews?" and "Is he always criticizing Vichy France?" All which Stone believed were poor questions to ask during a war in which collaborationist Vichy France (1940–44) actively participated in the military occupation as the puppet régime of France.  To the mainstream American reader concerned with the affairs of daily life, Stone reported that, "Questions like these are being used as a sieve to strain anti-fascists and liberals out of the government. They serve no other purpose.". Readers thanked The Nation for Stone's informing the public of the FBI's racist, fascistic and anti-Semitic un–American activities. Concomitantly, some on the American political right wing criticized Stone for maintaining the anonymity of his FBI sources.

In 1946 Freda Kirchwey, the editor (1933–55) of The Nation, fired Stone from the magazine for accepting employment with the newspaper PM (picture magazine) as a foreign correspondent covering the anti–British Jewish Resistance Movement in Mandatory Palestine (1920–48), where the Jews awaited the foundation of the State of Israel.

PM (newspaper)

Stone was the Washington, D.C., correspondent for PM, and published a series of feature articles about the Jewish European refugees who ran the British blockade to reach Palestine. He later further developed that reportage and wrote the book Underground to Palestine. In 1948 Picture Magazine closed, and was replaced in Stone's career first by the New York Star (1948-1949) and then by The Daily Compass, published until 1952.

I. F. Stone's Weekly
Although Stone had been a mainstream journalist in the 1930s, appearing on shows like Meet the Press (then a radio show), in 1950 he found himself blacklisted and unable to get work, possibly because Stone publicly admitted to his "fellow traveler" tendencies. In 1953, inspired by the example of the muckraking journalist George Seldes and his political weekly, In Fact, Stone started his own independent newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly. Over the next few years, Stone's newsletter campaigned against McCarthyism and racial discrimination in the United States.

In 1964, using evidence drawn from a close reading and analysis of published accounts, Stone was the only American journalist to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. During the 1960s, Stone continued to criticize the Vietnam War. At its peak in the 1960s, the Weekly only had a circulation of 70,000, but it was regarded as very influential.

Articles originally published in I. F. Stone's Weekly later were compiled and published in The I. F. Stone's Weekly Reader (1973), in three of six volumes of A Noncomformist History of Our Times (1989), a compendium of Stone's writing, and The Best of I.F. Stone (2006).

Views

Zionism and the State of Israel
In 1945, at war's end, Stone went to Mandatory Palestine (1920-1948) to report on the mass emigration of Eastern European Jews to Mandatory Palestine—peoples whom the Nazis had displaced from the countries of Eastern Europe. In Underground to Palestine (1948), Stone reported that the political, financial and personal interests of those displaced Jews would have been, in his opinion, better served by emigrating to the U.S. rather than to the Zionist Homeland for the Jewish people promised in the Balfour Declaration. Nonetheless, they preferred the promise of Israel in Stone's estimation because:
They have been kicked around as Jews, and now they want to live as Jews. Over and over I heard it said: 'We want to build a Jewish country ... We are tired of putting our sweat and blood into places where we are not welcome. ... ' These Jews want the right to live as a people, to build as a people, to make their contribution to the world as a people. Are their national aspirations any less worthy of respect than those of any other oppressed people?

As a secular Jew, Stone agreed with the nationalist aspirations of Zionism and publicly supported the State of Israel (1948), before the U.S. government granted official recognition. As a politically moderate Zionist, and like the politician Abba Eban, Stone supported the one-state solution of Israel as a bi-national state that Jews and Arabs would inhabit as equal citizens. Yet, in observing the military conflict that established the Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine, Stone became sympathetic to the Arab resistance to their physical dispossession (jobs, homes, land) and the political disenfranchisement (voided civil and political rights).

Stone's reportage of the conflict in the Middle East irritated Minister Eban, both for embarrassing him (a politically moderate Zionist) and his government and for dimming the international public image of the State of Israel as a refuge for oppressed peoples.

The Arab–Israeli conflict

The practical and professional consequences of being an openly left-wing journalist in the U. S. continued for I. F. Stone, when the U.S. State Department refused to issue a passport for him to travel overseas as a journalist. Stone filed a lawsuit against the State Department. In court, his brother-in-law, the attorney Leonard Boudin, established the right of a journalist to freely travel in the course of practicing his profession, and so thwarted the federal government's political interference with a journalist; afterwards, Stone travelled to Israel in 1956—before the Suez War (Oct 29 – November 7, 1956)—and reported that:

Consequent to the establishment of British, French, and Russian imperial spheres of influence in Asia Minor, by way of the Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916), the internal politics of the State of Israel became the Arab–Israeli conflict (1948 to date), which the West conflated to the geopolitics of the Cold War (1945–90) with each belligerent party, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., claiming hegemony over the Middle East.

In the book review article "Holy War" (Les Temps Modernes, June 1967), Stone said that superpower geopolitics are of secondary importance to the discontent of the Arabs and the Jews in the Levant.

The Korean War
Stone was critical of the Cold War, and its consequent reductions of the civil liberties and the civil and political rights of American citizens – what he saw as totalitarianism effected with the moral panic of loyalty oaths and the Second Red Scare (1947–57) of the McCarthy Era —  Stone wrote a book on the origin of the Korean War (1950–52). According to Stone, in an effort to convince the American people to support and fight in a war between two undemocratic Asian countries, U.S. government propaganda misrepresented the Korean War as necessary to the rollback fight against the international communist conspiracy for world domination, with Joseph Stalin controlling the conspiracy from Moscow.

In The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950–51, Stone said that South Korea had provoked North Korea to war, by way of continual guerrilla attacks across the border (38th parallel) into the north of Korea, and that, thus goaded, the North Koreans eventually counterattacked, and invaded the South, providing the official casus belli (June 25, 1950) required for Korean reunification. Stone asserted that such cross-border attacks, authorized by the South Korean government, were shaped by U.S. foreign policy for the worldwide containment of communism, which was advocated by John Foster Dulles, realized in the field by General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. commander in the Pacific Ocean military theater, and countenanced by Syngman Rhee, the strongman President of South Korea.

Allegations of espionage

Oleg Kalugin's comments

In The Independent newspaper in 1992, British journalist Andrew Brown reported that the Soviet Embassy attaché, KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, said that, "We had an agent—a well-known American journalist—with a good reputation, who severed his ties with us after 1956. I, myself, convinced him to resume them. But, in 1968, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia ... he said he would never again take any money from us."

In "How Many I. F. Stones Were There?", Herbert Romerstein, formerly of USIA and of the HUAC, and Ray Kerrison reported that Kalugin had identified I. F. Stone as the secret agent of whom he [Kalugin] had spoken with the journalist Andrew Brown. Eight years later, in The Venona Secrets (2000), Romerstein and Eric Breindel (editorial page editor of the New York Post) developed Kalugin's allegations about I. F. Stone being a secret agent for the Soviet Union.

In "The Attack on I.F. Stone", Andrew Brown said that when he "used the phrase an agent, to describe someone who turned out to be I. F. Stone", he understood the term metaphorically, meaning someone who was a "useful contact", and that the expression "take any money" referred to the fact that the journalist I.F. Stone would not permit a Soviet embassy employee to pay for a luncheon meal, neither then nor in the future, despite earlier lunches in the 1930s and 1940s. That, in September 1992, at the Moscow Journalists' Club, Kalugin had explained to the lawyer Martin Garbus that, "I have no proof that Stone was an agent. I have no proof that Stone ever received any money from the KGB, or the Russian government, I never gave Stone any money and was never involved with him as an agent."

In "Who's Out to Lunch Here?: I. F. Stone and the KGB", Cassandra Tate said that the alleged evidence of Stone's secret agent involvement with the KGB is based upon a few lines of text at the end of a speech by a KGB officer. She concluded that Stone was neither a Soviet agent, nor a collaborator of the KGB in the U.S.

In American Radical:The Life and Times of I. F. Stone, 2009), D. D. Guttenplan cited Kalugin's denials in The Nation and in the New York Post, although an earlier article had pointed to the possible ambiguity of the KGB's definition of the term "agent of influence." In multiple interviews, Kalugin contradicted Romerstein's allegation that Stone was a Soviet secret agent; two Stone biographers reported Kalugin's third-party denials that Stone was a Soviet secret agent. Myra MacPherson (All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone, 2006) reported that Kalugin said: "We had no clandestine relationship. We had no secret arrangement. I was the press officer [of the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C.] ... I never paid him anything. I sometimes bought lunch."

In his KGB memoirs, The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West (1994), about working as a press attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., Kalugin said that, besides I. F. Stone, he often met with journalists such as Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft, Drew Pearson, Chalmers Johnson, and Murray Marder. That Stone occasionally had a working-lunch with the Soviet press-attaché on shift, but ended that luncheon relationship after his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1956, and after hearing On the Personality Cult and its Consequences (February 26, 1956), the secret speech with which Nikita Khrushchev denounced the tyranny of Josef Stalin. When he returned from the Soviet Union, in his weekly newsletter, Stone wrote:
Whatever the consequences, I have to say what I really feel, after seeing the Soviet Union, and carefully studying the statements of its leading officials. This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men ... Nothing has happened in Russia to justify cooperation abroad, between the independent Left and the Communists.

Stone's published statements, about the Soviet Union, its regimented society, and its totalitarian government, by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), provoked hundreds of subscribers to cancel their subscriptions to I.F. Stone's Weekly newsletter. Kalugin said that he persuaded Stone to continue having working-luncheons with him, but that, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Stone refused to let Kalugin pay for the lunch, and consequently ceased meeting with him.

Venona Project
In 1995, the National Security Agency (NSA) published documents from the Venona Project (1943–80), a counter-intelligence program for the collection and decryption of KGB and GRU telegraph messages, collected from 1943 to 1980. On September 13, 1944, the KGB station in New York City transmitted a message to Moscow that Vladimir Pravdin, an NKVD officer working undercover as a reporter for TASS (the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union), had sought to communicate with a Soviet agent code-named BLIN, in Washington, DC, but that BLIN had been avoiding a meeting with Pravdin, claiming that his work schedule did not permit the requested meeting. He reported that Samuel Krafsur, an American NKVD agent codenamed IDE, who worked for TASS in the building that housed Stone's office, had tried to "sound him out, but BLIN did not react."

The Venona project transcript No. 1506 (October 23, 1944), indicated that Pravdin had succeeded in meeting with secret agent BLIN, and that he was "not refusing his aid" but explained that had "three children, and did not want to attract the attention of the FBI" and that BLIN's reluctance to meet Pravdin derived from "his unwillingness to spoil his career" because he "earned $1,500.00 per month but ... would not be averse to having a supplemental income."

In the article "Cables Coming in From the Cold" on the Venona Project transcripts, Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir said that interpreting the transcriptions is difficult, because of the hearsay nature of the messages; the many steps between a conversation and the sending of a cable; language-translation difficulties; the possibility of an imperfect decryption; and concluded that "the Venona messages are not like the old TV show You Are There [1953–57], in which history was re‑enacted before our eyes. They are history seen through a glass, darkly."

In their Cold War history, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (2000), John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr said that Stone was the Soviet secret agent BLIN. They cited four Venona cables that mentioned the American journalist I. F. Stone and that two of the cables contained evidence of Stone's pro–Soviet espionage. As well, the files of the KGB, from 1936 to 1939, indicate that Stone was a Soviet secret agent, who worked as a talent spotter, as a courier to other secret agents, and that he provided private and journalistic information to KGB, and Stone collaborated with the Communist Victor Perlo group, who gave him materials for use in journalistic exposés.

Moreover, in The Venona Secrets: The Definitive Exposé of Soviet Espionage in America (2000), Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel re-published the allegation that the American journalist I. F. Stone was the Soviet secret agent BLIN. As evidence, they cited Stone's statement, in a column (November 11, 1951) that responded to New York Herald Tribune reportage about his left wing sympathies, and that he would be unsurprised to read in that newspaper, "that I was smuggled in from Pinsk, in a carton of blintzes". That Stone's use of the word blintzes (pancakes) betrayed his knowledge of the word BLIN, his code name as a Soviet secret agent.

In the event, Stone's biographer Myra MacPherson said that the FBI never identified BLIN as being I. F. Stone, and, instead, suspected Ernest K. Lindley, who also was father to three children. The FBI claimed that secret agent BLIN must have been someone "whose true, pro–Soviet sympathies were not known to the public", hence, could not have been the journalist Stone, who, on the contrary, far from being "fearful", did not hide his left wing beliefs. Indeed, rather than wishing to avoid FBI attention, as BLIN reportedly did, I. F. Stone made a point of suggesting to the Soviet press attaché Oleg Kalugin that they have lunch at Harvey's, a favorite haunt of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, to "tweak his nose".

Alexander Vassiliev's allegations of espionage
In Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (2009), Klehr, Haynes, and Alexander Vassiliev, formerly of KGB, cite a KGB file [which Vassiliev saw in the Soviet Union] that named "Isidor Feinstein, a commentator for the New York Post" in the 1930s, as being secret agent BLIN, who "entered the channel of normal operational work" in 1936. That a note listed BLIN as an agent of the KGB station in New York City, in 1938. Klehr, Haynes, and Vassiliev said that Stone "assisted Soviet intelligence on a number of tasks, ranging from doing some talent spotting, acting as a courier, by relaying information to other agents, and providing private journalist tidbits and data [that] the KGB found interesting".

That BLIN was to help recruit and support the German resistance to Nazism in Berlin, from 1936 to 1938. Yet the authors admitted that Stone broke with the KGB after the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, and speculate that later Soviet communications with Stone were meant to reactivate their previous relationship. As such, Klehr, Haynes, and Vassiliev conclude that: "The documentary record shows that I. F. Stone consciously cooperated with Soviet intelligence, from 1936 through 1938, [Stone's Popular Front period]. An effort was made, by Soviet intelligence, to reestablish that relationship in 1944–45; we do not know whether that effort succeeded. To put it plainly, from 1936 to 1939 I. F. Stone was a Soviet spy".

In the article "Commentary's Trumped-up Case Against I. F. Stone", Jim Naureckas counters that the allegations of Klehr, Haynes, and Vassiliev, if true, merely indicate that I. F. Stone was "just gossiping", and criticizes them their "nefarious" and "tendentious" magnification of "relatively innocuous behavior" on the basis of one anti–Nazi activity. As for Stone being listed as an "agent" of the KGB, Naureckas said that Walter Lippmann also is listed as a Soviet secret agent.

In the article "I.F. Stone: Encounters with Soviet Intelligence", Max Holland said there is no question that I. F. Stone was a "fully recruited and witting agent" for the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938; yet, admits that Stone "was not a 'spy' in that he did not engage in espionage, and had no access to classified material".

In the book review of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (May 25, 2009),  D. D. Guttenplan said that "Spies never explains why we should believe KGB officers, pushed to justify their existence (and expense accounts), when they claim information comes from an elaborately recruited 'agent' rather than merely a source or contact". That the authors of Spies distort the report in Venona transcript No. 1506 (October 1944) and never prove that, in 1936, Soviet secret agent BLIN was I. F. Stone. That their allegations merely demonstrate that Stone "was a good reporter", and notes that Walter Lippmann is quoted in Spies as having professional contacts with "a Soviet journalist with whom he traded insights and information." This is the same man [Pravdin] whom Stone is said to have avoided. Nonetheless, the Vassilev notebook shows that Lippman was meeting Pravdin, not to pass the intelligence to him, but rather to find out what the true intentions of the Soviet government were. One of the KGB reports said, "He [Lippmann] is attempting to use his acquaintance with him [Pravdin] to determine our viewpoint on various issues of international politics. He is doing this, of course, very subtly, with the utmost tact. It should be recognized that by attempting to draw 'Sergei' into making candid comments, Imperialist [Lippmann] is sharing his own information with him".

In the book review of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (2010), Myra MacPherson said that the American co-author of the book, the journalist Max Holland, had persistently repeated discredited allegations that the American journalist I. F. Stone had accepted money from the Soviet Union, despite Holland's having acknowledged the unreliability of his source, KGB Gen. Oleg Kalugin:

As for the conflicting tales, woven by former KGB agent Kalugin, about his relationship with Stone, from 1966 to 1968, Holland correctly notes that 'Kalugin seemed incapable of telling the same story more than once'. Still, this did not keep Holland from repeating the damaging and long-refuted lie that Herbert Romerstein, former HUAC sleuth, developed after talking with Kalugin, that Moscow Gold  subsidized Stone's weekly. Nowhere is there any evidence that Stone took money for anything, except a possible lunch or two. Nor is there any evidence, as Holland points out, that Kalugin was able to plant [news] stories with Stone.

Retirement, classical scholarship, and death
In 1971, angina pectoris forced Stone to cease publication of the Weekly. After his retirement, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania, where he had dropped out years before. He earned a bachelor's degree in classical languages. Stone successfully learned Ancient Greek and wrote a book about the prosecution and death of Socrates, The Trial of Socrates, in which he argued that Socrates wanted to be sentenced to death to shame Athenian democracy, which he despised. The Trial of Socrates was a New York Times bestseller and was translated into 11 languages.

In 1970, Stone received the George Polk Award, and in 1976 he received the Conscience-in-Media Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Personal life
In 1929, Stone married Esther Roisman, who later worked as his assistant at I. F. Stone's Weekly. Their marriage produced three children, Celia, Jeremy, and Christopher. Esther's sister Jean, a poet, was the wife of radical lawyer Leonard Boudin. (Stone was thus the uncle of Weather Underground co-founder Kathy Boudin and conservative U.S. judge Michael Boudin.) The Stones' marriage lasted for sixty years. In 1989, Stone died of a heart attack in Boston at the age of 81.

Legacy

Memorial awards
On March 5, 2008, Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism announced plans to award an annual I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence and an associated I. F. Stone Workshop on Strengthening Journalistic Independence.

In 2008, the Park Center for Independent Media at the Roy H. Park School of Communications created the Izzy Award. The award goes to "an independent outlet, journalist, or producer for contributions to our culture, politics, or journalism created outside traditional corporate structures" for "special achievement in independent media".

Documentaries
On May 6, 2015, the non-profit peace organization, Catalytic Diplomacy, released The Legacy of I.F. Stone, Part One and Part Two, a pair of documentary videos exploring the legacy and influence of I. F. Stone and I.F. Stone's Weekly.

In 2016, the film ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone was released; a documentary on independent journalism in which the work and principles of I.F. Stone as an outcast journalist articulate the narrative.

Archive
The entire run of I.F. Stone's Weekly from January 17, 1953, through December 1, 1971, can be accessed through the ifstone.org website, along with many of Stone's speeches and other writings, and the documentary videos The Legacy of I.F. Stone, Part One and The Legacy of I.F. Stone, Part Two.

Music
Composer Scott Johnson makes extensive use of Stone's voice taken from a recorded 1981 lecture in his large-scale musical work, How It Happens, completed in 1991 on commission for the Kronos Quartet.

Influences
The 2008 Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards listed Stone's The Trial of Socrates as one of his three favorite books.

Publications

Books
 The Court Disposes (1937)
 Business as Usual (1941)
 Underground to Palestine (1946)
 This is Israel (1948)
 The Killings at Kent State (1971) LCCN 73148389
 The I. F. Stone's Weekly Reader (1973)
 The Trial of Socrates (Anchor Books, 1988)
 A Noncomformist History of Our Times (Little, Brown and Company, 1989)
 The War Years, 1939–1945.
 The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950–1951.
 The Truman Era, 1945–1952.
 The Haunted Fifties, 1953–1963.
 In a Time of Torment, 1961–1967.
 Polemics and Prophecies, 1967–1970.

Periodicals
 I.F. Stone's Weekly, January 17, 1953, through December 1, 1971

 I. F. Stone (1971–1989) New York Review of Books

Honorary Degree from Amherst College
 Newspaper Guild of New York Honors Page One Must for "Underground to Palestine" awarded in 1947
 The Eleanor Roosevelt Award
 The George Polk Award of Long Island University
 American Library Association Intellectual Freedom Award
 Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies Award
 Lifetime Achievement Award from Haddenfield High School (I. F. Stone's high school)
 A. J. Liebling Award for Journalistic Distinction
 Columbia University Journalism Award
 National Press Club Journalists' Journalist Award
 The American Civil Liberties Union Award
 The First Amendment Defender Award of the Catholic University's Columbus School of Law
 The Florina Lasker Civil Liberties Award from the New York Civil Liberties Union
 The Grand Prix Charles-Leopold Mayer of the French Academy of Sciences, November 1977
 The Sidney Hillman Foundation Award
 The Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications

Further reading

Documentaries

Biographies
 Robert C. Cottrell. (1992). Izzy: A Biography of I. F. Stone, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.  . 388 pages. 18 chapters. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index.
D. D. Guttenplan.  2009. American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
 The Secret History of Izzy by D. D. Guttenplan, The Nation, May 13, 2009
 "Armed With Words: D. D. Guttenplan's The Life and Times of I. F. Stone." Review by Tom Robbins in The Village Voice, June 2, 2009.
 Myra MacPherson. (2006). All Governments Lie!: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone, Scribner.

  (response to Paul Berman's review)

  (response to Paul Berman's review)
 Andrew Patner. (1988). I. F. Stone: A Portrait, Pantheon.

Related
 Frank J. Donner. (1980). The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Political Intelligence System. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
 Victor S. Navasky. (1980). Naming Names:  New York: The Viking Press.  .
 Ellen Schrecker. 1994. The Age Of McCarthyism: A Brief History With Documents. Boston: St. Martin's Press,
 Oleg Kalugin and Fen Montaigne. (1994). The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.

 Ellen Schrecker. 1998. Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Boston: Little Brown,
 Stanley Sandler. 1999. The Korean War: No Victors, No Vanquished, University Press of Kentucky, 0813109671

 Alexander Vassiliev, John Earl Haynes, and Harvey Klehr  Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) () "I. F. Stone: The Icon" pp. 146–52.

References

External links

  WebCitation archive.  archive.org archive.

 Video:

 I. F. Stone Interview at UC Berkeley, 1970
 Audio:
 "I. F. Stone Remembered," Radio Open Source, September 22, 2006
 John Whiting's 2009 review of D.D. Guttenplan's American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone which includes:
 I. F. Stone Lecture, 1963 Vietnam Day Teach-in at U.C. Berkeley
 I. F. Stone conversation, Part one, 1988 The New School, The Nation, WBAI
 I. F. Stone conversation, Part two, 1988 The New School, The Nation, WBAI
 Chris Koch's 1993 recount of Stone's about-face over the 1962 exposé by former FBI Special Agent Jack Levine
 Report of special agent Jack Levine
 former FBI Special Agent Jack Levine 1962 Raw recording by Richard Elman and Chris Koch of WBAI

1907 births
1989 deaths
American foreign policy writers
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
American political writers
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Haddonfield Memorial High School alumni
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People from Haddonfield, New Jersey
Writers from Philadelphia
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Activists from Philadelphia
20th-century American male writers
American male non-fiction writers
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American anti–Vietnam War activists
American Jewish anti-racism activists

I. F. Stone


Filipp Andreevich Malyavin () (October 22, 1869, Kazanka (Julian calendar: October 10) – December 23, 1940, Nice, Vichy France) was a Russian painter and draftsman. Trained in icon-painting as well as having studied under the great Russian realist painter Ilya Repin, Malyavin is unusual among the Russian artists of the time for having a peasant background. It is possibly due to this that his paintings often depict peasant life, and his most famous work, Whirlwind, shows peasant women dancing.

Biography
Filipp Malyavin was born in the large village of Kazanka (Samara Governorate, now Totsky District, Orenburg Oblast), into a poor peasant family with many children. Even as a child, he was drawn towards art, drawing and creating clay figurines of birds and animals from the age of five.

The village was visited by traveling monks, who would bring with them icons from Mount Athos, in Greece. Fascinated by the icons, Malyavin convinced his parents to allow him to go to Athos to study icon-painting. At the age of sixteen, he traveled to Greece with a monk from Athos, his journey financed by the villagers themselves.

Although the monasteries at Athos were famed for their vast collections of Greek manuscripts and books, the art of icon painting was not actually practiced there. Malyavin was disappointed to learn that they only made copies of Russian icons. Having used up his money and thus unable to return to Russia, Malyavin entered the monastery as a novice, and was charged with painting icons and murals.

This continued until 1891, when Malyavin met Vladimir Beklemishev, a Russian sculptor and professor at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts who was on a visit to Athos. Beklemishev was greatly impressed by Malyavin's work and invited him to Petersburg.

In March 1892, Malyavin arrived in St. Petersburg and, with Beklemishev's help, was enrolled in the Academy of Arts. Due to the Academy reforms of 1894, Malyavin was able to choose his own teacher after completing the Academy curriculum. His options included such great artists as Vladimir Makovsky and Arkhip Kuindzhi. However, Malyavin applied for, and was accepted into, the studio of Russian realist Ilya Repin, who among others, also taught Igor Grabar, Konstantin Somov, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, and Boris Kustodiev.

It was here, in Repin's studio, that Malyavin began creating some of his most famous early works, including Peasant Girl Knitting a Stocking (1895), which is the first of his paintings in which he introduces his favorite color, red. Three of these early works, all depicting peasant women, were exhibited at the Moscow Art Lovers' Society Salon. Two of these were bought by Pavel Tretyakov for the Tretyakov Gallery.

Malyavin also began to perfect his style of portraiture, creating another series of paintings depicting his fellow-artists from Repin's studio. Among the best of these is that of Konstantin Somov, who would later found the World of Art group. Malyavin's fame spread quickly, and it was not long before society grandees such as Baroness Wolf and Mme. Popova began coming to him to have their portraits painted.

From 1895 to 1899, Malyavin painted frenetically. In 1897, he was awarded the status of Artist, but only after much debate, and for his series of portraits rather than his competition painting, Laughter, which depicted Russian women in red dresses in a green meadow. His work was too different, too bright, and it had no plot - it did not fit the contemporary art scene at the time.

Thus, in 1900, Malyavin traveled to Paris, and took France by storm. French newspapers hailed him as "a credit to Russian painting," and Laughter was awarded a gold medal and bought by the Museo d'arte moderno in Venice. His work was suddenly in demand, with the Luxembourg Museum in Paris buying Three Women.

On returning to Russia, Malyavin married Natalia Novaak-Sarich, the daughter of a rich industrialist from Odessa and a private student at the Higher Art School. They settled in a village near Ryazan, and Malyavin devoted himself entirely to his art. His work began appearing in the salons of the World of Art group, and the Union of Russian Artists.

Malyavin reached his peak between 1905 and 1907, during Russia's revolutionary crisis. Unlike other painters, at this time he focused on his "peasant" canvases. These paintings are unusual in terms of their use of bright colors and their large scales, which mark them more than their usually generic titles.

In 1906, Malyavin painted Whirlwind, his greatest painting, and the Assembly of the Academy of Arts awarded him the rank of "Academician," "in consideration of his fame in the field of art."

Between 1908 and 1910, Malyavin did not display any work, and the official art critics began attacking him more and more frequently. He traveled to Paris, and on his return, painted a large family portrait, which he exhibited in January 1911, at the salon of the Union of Russian Artists. The painting was a failure, and between 1911 and 1915, Malyavin exhibited only the works of the earlier period.

In 1918, Malyavin moved with his family to Ryazan, where he participated in the Ryazan Commissariat for Education's propaganda of art and taught. In 1920, he went to Moscow, where he was admitted to the Kremlin and made drawings for Lenin's portrait. He also painted a portrait of Anatoly Lunacharsky, and his works were displayed in Moscow exhibitions.

In fall of 1922, Malyavin traveled abroad with his family yet again, to organize a traveling exhibition of his works. The family settled in Paris, where he painted portraits on commission and where his work was exhibited in 1924. In 1933, he toured Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, England, and Sweden, exhibiting his work, and in 1935 and 1937, he exhibited his work in London, Stockholm, and Nice.

Malyavin died on December 23, 1940, in Nice. He is noted for changing the portrayal of peasants in Russian painting and for his brilliant use of color.

References

Literature

External links

ArtNet Biography
Philip Maliavin
Philip Malyavin

1869 births
1940 deaths
People from Orenburg Oblast
People from Buzuluksky Uyezd
19th-century painters from the Russian Empire
Russian male painters
20th-century Russian painters
Draughtsmen
19th-century male artists from the Russian Empire
20th-century Russian male artists
People associated with Mount Athos

Filipp Malyavin


Bagrat () (8 May 1776 – 8 May 1841) was a Georgian royal prince (batonishvili) of the House of Bagrationi and an author. A son of King George XII of Georgia, Bagrat occupied important administrative posts in the last years of the Georgian monarchy, after whose abolition by the Russian Empire in 1801 he entered the imperial civil service. He was known in Russia as the tsarevich Bagrat Georgievich Gruzinsky (). He is the author of works in the history of Georgia, veterinary medicine and economics. Bagrat is the forefather of the surviving descendants of the last kings of Georgia.

Life in Georgia
Bagrat was born in Tbilisi into the family of Crown Prince George, the future king George XII, and his first wife Ketevan née Andronikashvili. In 1790, Bagrat, then aged 14, received a princely domain in the Ksani valley after his reigning grandfather, Erekle II, dispossessed the defiant Kvenipneveli dynasty of the duchy of Ksani, dividing it into three parts. Other parts of the duchy were granted to Bagrat's elder brother Ioann and uncle Iulon. In addition, during the reign of his father George XII (1798–1801), Bagrat received Kakheti in possession. Around the same time, he became involved in a dynastic feud among the numerous posterity of Erekle II and George XII. In November 1800, Bagrat was one of the commanders of a combined Russo-Georgian force that defeated the joint invasion by the Avar khan Umma and Bagrat's own paternal half-uncle Alexander on the banks of the Iori in Kakheti.

Life in Russia
After George XII's death in 1800, the arrival of the Russian rule brought the Bagrationi rule to an end. The members of the Georgian royal family were deprived of their estates and deported to Russia proper. Unlike many of his royal relatives, Bagrat did not take arms against the Russian regime and, in 1803, accepted his exile in Moscow, which he left the day before the city's occupation by the French troops in 1812, and then in St. Petersburg, where he would live until his death. He was made a chamberlain of the Russian tsar Alexander I in 1818 and became a Privy Councillor and Senator of the empire in 1828.

During his life in Russia, Bagrat composed a continuation of the Georgian history written by his brother David, covering the period from the middle of the 18th century to the 1840s. He also compiled a list of Georgians fighting in the Russian ranks against Napoleonic France in 1812. He also authored memoirs and the first Georgian-language book in veterinary medicine, published in St. Petersburg in 1818.

Family

Prince Bagrat was married to Princess Ekaterine [Ketevan] Cholokashvili (1781 – 30 June 1831), a daughter of Prince Durmishkhan Cholokashvili, sometime bailiff (mouravi) of Pshavi and Khevsureti. She died of cholera in St. Petersburg and was buried at the Smolensky Cemetery. Bagrat and Ekaterina were the parents of ten children, of whom only three reached adulthood:
Prince Spiridon (1800 – died in infancy).
Princess Barbare (Varvara Bagratovna Gruzinskaya) (1804–1870), married Lieutenant-General Prince Dimitri Orbeliani.
Princess Daria (Daria Bagratovna Gruzinskaya) (1808–1809).
Prince Petre (Pyotr Bagratovich Gruzinsky) (1811–1812).
Prince Giorgi (Georgy Bagratovich Gruzinsky) (1812–c. 1816).
Princess Elisabed (Elizaveta Bagratovna Gruzinskaya) (1813–1815).
Prince Nikoloz (Nikolay Bagratovich Gruzinsky) (1816–1833).
Prince Konstantine (Konstantin Bagratovich Gruzinsky) (born 1817).
Prince David (David Bagratovich Gruzinsky) (30 April 1819 – 24 September 1888), an unofficial head of the Georgian royal house (1880–1888). He was married to Anna Alekseyevna Mazurina (11 January 1824 – 10 August 1866), with one son, Spiridon (born 1861).
Prince Alexander (Alexander Bagratovich Gruzinsky) (1820–1865).

Ancestry

References

Bibliography

Bagrationi dynasty of the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti
1776 births
1841 deaths
Georgian princes
19th-century historians from Georgia (country)
Generals from Georgia (country)
Politicians from Georgia (country)
Senators of the Russian Empire
Writers from Tbilisi
Male writers from Georgia (country)

Prince Bagrat of Georgia


James Bradley Orman (November 4, 1849 – July 21, 1919) was an American politician and railroad builder. He served as the 12th Governor of Colorado from 1901 to 1903. He was a Democrat.

Life and career
Orman was born in Muscatine, Iowa and grew up on his family's farm there. In 1869, he moved to Colorado at the age of 20, along with his brother William. The brothers soon started a construction company which, though it did a variety of projects, was most famous for building railroads, particularly in Colorado and Kansas.

James Orman moved to Pueblo, Colorado in 1874, and soon entered politics. He was elected to several terms in the Colorado state legislature and the Pueblo city council, and he served as mayor of Pueblo from 1897 to 1898. In 1883 the state democratic party nominated him to the United States Senate, but the state legislature, which chose senators at that time, elected Thomas M. Bowen over James Orman by three votes.

Orman became the Democratic nominee for governor in 1900. Though Colorado was generally a Republican state, the Republican Party was divided over the free silver controversy, and the United States Populist Party, though in decline, was still a prominent third party in Colorado. When the Silver Republicans and populists endorsed Orman, he was elected easily.

The greatest problem during his administration was a dispute between miners and a mining company. On May 1, 1901, 350 miners led by Vincent Saint John, and organized by the Western Federation of Miners, walked away from their jobs at the Smuggler-Union mine in Telluride. Their walkout was a protest of a new method of payment, called "contracting", or "fathoms", which could sometimes result in a miner doing thirty days' worth of digging, and getting paid nothing for the work. But the contract system was worse than that; if the miner received no pay due to failing to perform according to the contract, then he owed money to the company for tools and powder.

A shooting war was triggered when one of the strikers, believed to have been unarmed, had been shot through the throat by a deputized mine guard. In spite of intense pressure from others, Lieutenant Governor David C. Coates helped to persuade Governor Orman not to send the Colorado National Guard. Coates volunteered to mediate, and he was dispatched by the governor to be part of a commission sent to Telluride to investigate the issues that caused the walkout. Vincent St. John and mine operator Arthur L. Collins finally met across the table, and the commission was able to effect a settlement between the miners and the company, resulting in more than a year of labor peace in San Miguel County's silver mines.

Orman served one two-year term, as most Colorado governors did at that time. After his term as governor he moved back to Pueblo and retired from politics, but was active in business. Following his death, he was buried in Pueblo.

In 1901, in response to thousands of requests, Orman commuted the sentence of Edward O'Kelley, who had killed Robert Ford, the man who murdered outlaw Jesse James.

Orman was married to Nellie Martin (1858-1918) from 1876 until her death. They had two children, Frederick and Edna.

Notes

External links
 James B. Orman  Colorado State Archives

1849 births
1919 deaths
Colorado city council members
Democratic Party governors of Colorado
People from Muscatine, Iowa
19th-century American politicians

James Bradley Orman


Ara Gevorgian (Gevorgyan) (born April 19, 1960, Yerevan) is an Armenian musician, composer and musical producer. In 2004 he was awarded by the Honorary Artist of the Republic of Armenia title by the President Robert Kocharyan.

Biography
Gevorgian is the son of well-known Armenian folk-singer Valya Samvelyan. He studied at #31 school of Yerevan and at the A. Tigranyan musical school at the same time. During the two years he studied at Yerevan #8 college of Fine Arts. From 1983 to 1987 he studied at Armenian pedagogical institute after Khachatur Abovyan at the faculty of wood wide instruments and pop music department.
In 1987-1989 Gevorgian taught conducting at the same Institute, then he worked at Armenian Television ("3-Aliq" TV program).

In 1983 he founded the "Rally" Armenian pop-rock band, the participant of "Song - 85" festival.

He participated in the Opening Ceremony of the Cultural Year of Armenia in Russia hosted at the Moscow Kremlin Music Hall and honored by the presence of the presidents of Armenia and Russia Robert Kocharyan and Vladimir Putin respectively and the famous singer Charles Aznavour.

Ara Gevorgian co-operates with Jivan Gasparyan, Ian Gillan, Demis Roussos, Pedro Eustache, Daniel Decker and others. Among his most popular songs are "Adana", "Artsakh", "Ov Hayots Ashkharh" and "Ovkyanosits ayn koghm".

Discography
1995 "Ovkianosits Ayn Koghm" (Over the ocean)
1997 "Nostalgie"
1999 "Ani" (a prize winner of All-Armenian Music Awards in the USA)
2001 "Khor Virab" (a prize winner of All-Armenian Music Awards in the USA).

Other websites
Ara Gevorgian's Official site
Gevorgyan at Persons.AM
Armenian Music Center

Armenian composers
1960 births
Musicians
Living people

Ara Gevorgyan


Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis OBE, FNA, FASc, FRS (29 June 1893– 28 June 1972) was an Indian scientist and statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure, and for being one of the members of the first Planning Commission of free India. He made pioneering studies in anthropometry in India. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute, and contributed to the design of large-scale sample surveys. For his contributions, Mahalanobis has been considered the Father of statistics in India.

Early life
Mahalanobis belonged to a prominent Bengali Brahmin family of landed gentry in Bikrampur, Dhaka, Bengal Presidency (now in Bangladesh). His grandfather Gurucharan (1833–1916) moved to Calcutta in 1854 and built up a business, starting a chemist shop in 1860. Gurucharan was influenced by Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), father of the Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Gurucharan was actively involved in social movements such as the Brahmo Samaj, acting as its treasurer and president. His house on 210 Cornwallis Street was the centre of the Brahmo Samaj. Gurucharan married a widow, an action against social traditions at that time.

Gurucharan's younger son, Prabodh Chandra (1869–1942), was the father of P.  C.  Mahalanobis. Born in the house at 210 Cornwallis Street, Mahalanobis grew up in a socially active family surrounded by intellectuals and reformers.

Mahalanobis received his early schooling at the Brahmo Boys School in Calcutta, graduating in 1908. He joined the Presidency College, then affiliated with the University of Calcutta, where he was taught by teachers who included Jagadish Chandra Bose, and Prafulla Chandra Ray. Others attending were Meghnad Saha, a year junior, and Subhas Chandra Bose, two years his junior at college. Mahalanobis received a Bachelor of Science degree with honours in physics in 1912. He left for England in 1913 to join the University of London.

After missing a train, he stayed with a friend at King's College, Cambridge. He was impressed by King's College Chapel and his host's friend M. A. Candeth suggested that he could try joining there, which he did. He did well in his studies at King's, but also took an interest in cross-country walking and punting on the river. He interacted with the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan during the latter's time at Cambridge. After his Tripos in physics, Mahalanobis worked with C. T. R. Wilson at the Cavendish Laboratory. He took a short break and went to India, where he was introduced to the Principal of Presidency College and was invited to take classes in physics.

After returning to England, Mahalanobis was introduced to the journal Biometrika. This interested him so much that he bought a complete set and took them to India. He discovered the utility of statistics to problems in meteorology and anthropology, beginning to work on problems on his journey back to India.

In Calcutta, Mahalanobis met Nirmalkumari (Rani), daughter of Heramba Chandra Maitra, a leading educationist and member of the Brahmo Samaj. They married on 27 February 1923, although her father did not completely approve of the union. He was concerned about Mahalanobis's opposition to various clauses in the membership of the student wing of the Brahmo Samaj, including prohibitions against members' drinking alcohol and smoking. Sir Nilratan Sircar, P. C. Mahalanobis' maternal uncle, took part in the wedding ceremony in place of the father of the bride.

Indian Statistical Institute

Many colleagues of Mahalanobis took an interest in statistics. An informal group developed in the Statistical Laboratory, which was located in his room at the Presidency College, Calcutta. On 17 December 1931 Mahalanobis called a meeting with Pramatha Nath Banerji (Minto Professor of Economics), Nikhil Ranjan Sen (Khaira Professor of Applied Mathematics) and Sir R. N. Mukherji. Together they established the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Baranagar, and formally registered on 28 April 1932 as a non-profit distributing learned society under the Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860.

The institute was initially in the Physics Department of the Presidency College; its expenditure in the first year was Rs. 238. It gradually grew with the pioneering work of a group of his colleagues, including S. S. Bose, J. M. Sengupta, R. C. Bose, S. N. Roy, K. R. Nair, R. R. Bahadur, Gopinath Kallianpur, D. B. Lahiri and C. R. Rao. The institute also gained major assistance through Pitambar Pant, who was a secretary to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Pant was trained in statistics at the Institute and took a keen interest in its affairs.

In 1933, the Institute founded the journal Sankhya, along the lines of Karl Pearson's Biometrika.

The institute started a training section in 1938. Many of the early workers left the ISI for careers in the United States and with the government of India. Mahalanobis invited J. B. S. Haldane to join him at the ISI; Haldane joined as a Research Professor from August 1957, staying until February 1961. He resigned from the ISI due to frustrations with the administration and disagreements with Mahalanobis' policies. He was concerned with the frequent travels and absence of the director and complained that the "... journeyings of our Director define a novel random vector." Haldane helped the ISI develop in biometrics.

In 1959, the institute was declared as an institute of national importance and a Deemed university.

The methods pioneered at the institute are now used by the World Bank and the United Nations. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton and co-author Valerie Kozel wrote in 2005: "Where Mahalanobis and India led, the rest of the world has followed, so that today, most countries have a recent household income or expenditure survey. Most countries, can only envy India in its statistical capacity".

Economists TN Srinivasan, Rohini Somanathan, Pranab Bardhan and another Nobel-winner Abhijit Banerjee have since argued that there is "no other instance of an entirely homegrown institution in a developing country becoming a world leader in a large field of general interest".

Contributions to statistics

Mahalanobis distance

Mahalanobis distance is one of the most widely used metrics to find how much a point diverges from a distribution, based on measurements in multiple dimensions. It is widely used in the field of cluster analysis and classification. It was first proposed by Mahalanobis in 1930 in context of his study on racial likeness. From a chance meeting with Nelson Annandale, then the director of the Zoological Survey of India, at the 1920 Nagpur session of the Indian Science Congress led to Annandale asking him to analyse anthropometric measurements of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta. Mahalanobis had been influenced by the anthropometric studies published in the journal Biometrika and he chose to ask the questions on what factors influence the formation of European and Indian marriages. He wanted to examine if the Indian side came from any specific castes. He used the data collected by Annandale and the caste-specific measurements made by Herbert Risley to come up with the conclusion that the sample represented a mix of Europeans mainly with people from Bengal and Punjab but not with those from the Northwest Frontier Provinces or from Chhota Nagpur. He also concluded that the intermixture more frequently involved the higher castes than the lower ones. This analysis was described by his first scientific article in 1922. During the course of these studies he found a way of comparing and grouping populations using a multivariate distance measure. This measure, denoted "D2" and now eponymously named Mahalanobis distance, is independent of measurement scale. Mahalanobis also took an interest in physical anthropology and in the accurate measurement of skull measurements for which he developed an instrument that he called the "profiloscope".

Sample survey
His most important contributions are related to large-scale sample surveys. He introduced the concept of pilot surveys and advocated the usefulness of sampling methods. Early surveys began between 1937 and 1944 and included topics such as consumer expenditure, tea-drinking habits, public opinion, crop acreage and plant disease. Harold Hotelling wrote: "No technique of random sample has, so far as I can find, been developed in the United States or elsewhere, which can compare in accuracy with that described by Professor Mahalanobis" and Sir R. A. Fisher commented that "The ISI has taken the lead in the original development of the technique of sample surveys, the most potent fact-finding process available to the administration".

He introduced a method for estimating crop yields which involved statisticians sampling in the fields by cutting crops in a circle of diameter 4 feet. Others such as P. V. Sukhatme and V. G. Panse who began to work on crop surveys with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and the Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute suggested that a survey system should make use of the existing administrative framework. The differences in opinion led to acrimony and there was little interaction between Mahalanobis and agricultural research in later years.

Later life
In later life, Mahalanobis was a member of the planning commission contributed prominently to newly independent India's five-year plans starting from the second. In the second five-year plan he emphasized industrialization on the basis of a two-sector model. His variant of Wassily Leontief's Input-output model, the Mahalanobis model, was employed in the Second Five Year Plan, which worked towards the rapid industrialisation of India and with other colleagues at his institute, he played a key role in the development of a statistical infrastructure. He encouraged a project to assess deindustrialization in India and correct some previous census methodology errors and entrusted this project to Daniel Thorner.

In the 1950s, Mahalanobis played a critical role in the campaign to bring India its first digital computers.

Mahalanobis also had an abiding interest in cultural pursuits and served as secretary to Rabindranath Tagore (about whom he would write in the Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia), particularly during the latter's foreign travels, and also worked at his Visva-Bharati University, for some time. He received India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan from the Government of India for his contribution to science and services to the country.

Mahalanobis died on 28 June 1972, a day before his seventy-ninth birthday. Even at this age, he was still active doing research work and discharging his duties as the secretary and director of the Indian Statistical Institute and as the honorary statistical advisor to the Cabinet of the Government of India.

Honours

 Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (FASc, 1935)
 Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (FNA, 1935)
 Officer of the Order of the British Empire (Civil Division), 1942 New Year Honours list
 Weldon Memorial Prize from the University of Oxford (1944)
 Fellow of the Royal Society, London (1945)
 President of Indian Science Congress (1950)
 Fellow of the Econometric Society, US (1951)
 Fellow of the Pakistan Statistical Association (1952)
 Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, UK (1954)
 Sir Deviprasad Sarvadhikari Gold Medal (1957)
 Foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1958)
 Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge (1959)
 Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1961)
 Durgaprasad Khaitan Gold Medal (1961)
 Desikottam by Visva Bharati University (1961)
 Padma Vibhushan (1968)
 Srinivasa Ramanujan Gold Medal (1968)

The government of India decided in 2006 to celebrate Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis's birthday, 29 June, every year as "National Statistics Day" of India.

On the occasion of his 125th birth anniversary on 29 June 2018, Indian Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu released a commemorative coin at a programme at ISI, Kolkata.

In popular culture
 Mahalanobis appears in the 2015 movie The Man Who Knew Infinity about the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan. He is portrayed by Shazad Latif.
 Mahalanobis was honoured with a Google doodle on his 125th birthday on 29 June 2018.

See also
List of Indian mathematicians

References

Further reading

External links

 P.C. Mahalanobis at the Encyclopædia Britannica
 Biography from ISI Bangalore Website
 ISI publication archives

1893 births
1972 deaths
Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
Bengali Hindus
Bengali scientists
Brahmos
Indian development economists
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
Fellows of the Econometric Society
Fellows of the Royal Society
Fellows of the Indian National Science Academy
Foreign Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences
Founders of Indian schools and colleges
20th-century Indian economists
Indian statisticians
Indian institute directors
People from Bikrampur
Scientists from Kolkata
Presidency University, Kolkata alumni
Academic staff of Presidency University, Kolkata
Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan in literature & education
People associated with Santiniketan
Principals of Presidency University, Kolkata
University of Calcutta alumni
Academic staff of the University of Calcutta
Members of the Planning Commission of India
20th-century Indian mathematicians
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
Mathematical statisticians

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis


A random variable is used in mathematics to study probability theory. It was developed to model the chance of events happening in all kinds of real-life scenarios.

Definition
Take two measurable spaces, and name them  and . A measurable space is any pair of sets, called  and , that follow these rules:
  is not empty;
 The elements of  are subsets of ;
  and the empty set are both elements of ;
  is closed under complements and countable unions.
A random variable, named , is a measurable function from  to . This is written . A random variable is typically represented by capital roman letters such as , ,  and , and can be either discrete (taking on a countable set of values) or continuous (taking on an interval of values).

The set  is called the sample space. The set  is called the event space.

Use in Probability
Take a probability measure  on . Take a set  in . Then  is defined to mean .

Examples with Dice
When you roll a dice, 6 events can happen. These events are the different numbers that can show on the dice: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6.

Dicing Fruit
Here is an example of a random variable. You roll a fair dice once. If the number on the dice is odd, you eat an apple, and if the number is even, you eat an orange. The random variable is the type of fruit that you will eat. Before you roll the dice, you don't know if you will eat an apple or an orange. We can also write this with mathematics:

Take . Take  to be the power set of . Take . Take  to be the power set of . Our random variable follows the even/odd rule from above:

Here  represents the number on the dice after you roll it. We said the dice is fair. In mathematics, this means  for  and .

The event that you eat an apple is a set in the event space. It is . The probability that you eat an apple is the probability measure of this set. It is .

Dicing Fruit Unfairly
Here is another example. Sometimes a dice is unbalanced. This means that it rolls some numbers more often than others. We can do the same experiment as above, but with an unbalanced dice.

For example, let's say that we use a dice that has been changed in one way: it never rolls the number 5. Then you are less likely to eat an apple, because 5 is an odd number. The random variable is exactly the same as before:

This is because end possibilities have not changed. After the dice is rolled, you will eat an apple or an orange. You don't know which. What has changed is the probability that you eat an apple or an orange. In mathematics, this means

The event that you eat an apple is the same set as for the fair dice. It is . But this event is now less likely to happen, because the dice cannot roll a 5. In other words, the probability that you eat an apple is different than for the fair dice. It is .

Probability spaces
The examples show that a random variable doesn't automatically give probabilities. If we choose  differently, one random variable can give different probabilities. This can be confusing. For this reason, mathematicians often define a random variable on a probability space. The mathematical notation for this is . This fixes the probability measure. Then there is no confusion about the probabilities of events.

Related pages

 Expected value
 Probability density function

References

Further reading
 Klenke, Achim, Probability Theory: A Comprehensive Course : Springer (2013)

Statistics
Probability theory

Random variable


Albert Cossery (3 November 1913 – 22 June 2008) was an Egyptian-born French writer. Although Cossery lived most of his life in Paris and only wrote in the French language, all of his novels were either set in his country of birth, Egypt, or in an imaginary Middle Eastern country. He was nicknamed "The Voltaire of the Nile". His writings pay tribute to the humble and to the misfits of his childhood in Cairo, as well as praise a form of laziness and simplicity very distant from our contemporary society.

Albert Cossery was well known in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where he lived in the same hotel, Hotel La Louisiane, since 1945.

Life

Albert Cossery (Arabic: البرت قصيري) was born in Cairo to a Greek Orthodox Christian family of Syrian descent, specifically from al-Qusayr. His parents were wealthy small-property owners that originally owned land in Damietta. In a conversation with Lebanese writer Abdallah Naaman in 1998, Cossery said, "We are the "Shawams" (Levantines, referring to the Bilad al-Sham) of Egypt. My father is a Greek Orthodox native of the village of al-Qusayr, near Homs, in Syria. Upon arriving in Cairo at the end of the 19th century, the family adopted "Cossery" (after al-Qusayr) as their family name due to its simplified pronunciation." The Cossery family, as well as all of the elites living in Egypt during this era, were well steeped in French culture. At the age of 17, inspired by reading Honoré de Balzac,  he emigrated to Paris to continue studies that he never completed, writing and settled permanently in the French capital in 1945, where he lived until his death in 2008.

In 60 years he only wrote eight novels, in accordance with his philosophy of life in which "laziness" is not a vice but a form of contemplation and meditation. In his own words: "So much beauty in the world, so few eyes to see it." At the age of 27 he published his first book, Les hommes oubliés de Dieu ("Men God Forgot"). During his literary career he became close friend of other writers and artists such as Lawrence Durrell, Albert Camus, Jean Genet and Giacometti.

Cossery died on 22 June 2008, aged 94.

His books, which always take place in Egypt or other Arab countries, portray the contrast between poverty and wealth, the powerful and the powerless, in a witty although dramatic way. His writing mocks vanity and the narrowness of materialism and his principal characters are mainly vagrants, thieves or dandies that subvert the order of an unfair society. His novels often feature auto-biographical characters, like Teymour, the hero of the novel Un complot de saltimbanques, a young man who forges a diploma in chemical engineering after a life of enjoyment and lust abroad instead of study and gets back to his home town and enters into an unexpected intringue against the authorities with his dandy friends. He is considered by some to be the last genuine "anarchist" or free thinking writer of western culture by his humorous and provocative although lucid and profound view of human relations and society. His writing style does not submit to an academic or experimental approach which makes him a vivid, catchy storyteller, without the boredom nor artificial ambiguity of some classical (which he is) or avantgarde writers. The sageness of his works are monuments to the freedom of being and thought against materialism, the contemporary obsession with consumption and productivity, the arrogance and abuse of authority, the vanity of social formalities and the injustice of the wealthy towards the poor.

In 1990 Cossery was awarded the Grand prix de la francophonie of the Académie française and in 2005 the Grand Prix Poncetton de la SGDL.

The first of his books translated in English are Men God Forgot (first translated by Harold Edwards of Faruk University, Alexandria, Egypt, not by Henry Miller, whose note on Cossery appeared on a later 1963 City Lights Books edition, and published in the United States in 1946 by George Leite's Circle Editions of Berkeley), The House of Certain Death (New Directions, 1949), The Lazy Ones (New Directions, 1952), and Proud Beggars (Black Sparrow Press, 1981).

Three more of Cossery's novels have since been published in English translation: Anna Moschovakis' The Jokers (NYRB Classics) and Alyson Waters' A Splendid Conspiracy and The Colors of Infamy (New Directions). As of 2014, Une ambition dans le désert remains untranslated into English.

Works
 Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu (1940)
 Men God Forgot, translation by Harold Edwards (Circle Edition, 1946)
 La Maison de la mort certaine (1944)
 The House of Certain Death, translation by Stuart B. Kaiser (New Directions Publishing, 1949)
 Les Fainéants dans la vallée fertile (1948)
 Laziness in the Fertile Valley, translation by William Goyen (New Directions Publishing, 1953)
 Mendiants et Orgueilleux (1955)
 Proud Beggars, translation by Thomas W. Cushing (Black Sparrow Press, 1981), revised by Alyson Waters (New York Review Books, 2011)
 La Violence et la Dérision (1964)
 Violence and Derision, also called The Jokers, translation by Anna Moschovakis (New York Review Books, 2010)
 Un complot de saltimbanques (1975)
 A Splendid Conspiracy, translation by Alyson Waters (New Directions Publishing, 2010)
 Une ambition dans le désert (1984)
 An Ambition in the Desert
 Les Couleurs de l'infamie (1999)
 The Colors of Infamy, translation by Alyson Waters (New Directions Publishing, 2011)

Films
In 1978 Les fainéants dans la vallée fertile was made into a film by the Greek director Nikos Panagiotopoulos. (First Prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Second Prize at the Chicago Film Festival). ()
Beggars and Noblemen (1991) and The Jokers (2004) were made into movies by the female Egyptian film director Asmaa El-Bakry.
Cossery was the screenwriter for Les Guichets du Louvre.

References

Bibliography
 Conversation avec Albert Cossery ( Michel Mitrani ) 1995 - Joelle Losfeld
 L'Egypte d'Albert Cossery     2001 - Joelle Losfeld
 Le Magazine littéraire Novembre 2005 -  Propos recueillis par Aliette Armel
 egyptiansurrealism.com

1913 births
2008 deaths
French novelists
French writers
Egyptian emigrants to France
Egyptian novelists
Eastern Orthodox Christians from France
Egyptian people of Syrian descent
Greek Orthodox Christians from Egypt
Writers from Cairo
Levantine-Egyptians
20th-century novelists
Burials at Montparnasse Cemetery
Legion of Honour refusals

Albert Cossery


Thakin Than Tun (; 1911 – 24 September 1968) was a Burmese politician and leader of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) from 1945 until his assassination in 1968. He was uncle of the former State Counsellor of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi.

Early life
Than Tun was born in 1911 in Kanyutkwin, British Burma. He married Khin Khin Gyi, the elder sister of Aung San Suu Kyi's mother Khin Kyi.

Struggle for independence
Than Tun worked as a school teacher after qualifying from the Teachers' Training School, Rangoon, and was influenced by Marxist writings. He joined in 1936 the nationalist Dobama Asiayone ("Our Burma" Association) and helped forge an alliance with Dr Ba Maw's Poor Man's Party to form the Freedom Bloc. He co-founded the Nagani (Red Dragon) Book Club with Thakin Nu in 1937, which for the first time widely circulated Burmese-language translations of the Marxist classics. He was imprisoned by the British in 1940 along with Thakin Nu, Thakin Soe, Dr. Ba Maw, and Kyaw Nyein.

While in Insein prison in July 1941, he co-authored with Thakin Soe the "Insein Manifesto" which identified world fascism as the major enemy in the coming war and called for temporary cooperation with the British and the establishment of a broad coalition alliance that should include the Soviet Union. The struggle for national liberation against imperialism would be resumed after the defeat of fascism. This was against the prevailing opinion of the Dobama movement including Thakin Aung San who had secretly left Burma with a group of young men subsequently known as the Thirty Comrades in order to receive military training from the Japanese and founded the Burma Independence Army (BIA).

When Ba Maw's pro-Japanese government was established in 1942, Than Tun served as Minister of Land and Agriculture, and he met and married Khin Gyi, sister of Aung San Suu Kyi's mother Khin Kyi. Aung San married Khin Kyi about the same time shortly after he became Minister of War; the BIA was renamed the Burma Defence Army (BDA). Than Tun could pass on Japanese intelligence to Thakin Soe who had gone underground in the Delta region in order to organise resistance against the Japanese Occupation. Thakins Thein Pe and Tin Shwe were sent to India to make contact with the British colonial government in exile at Simla. At the end of World War II, after the Japanese had been defeated and the British had returned, Than Tun became general secretary of the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL) formed by the CPB, the People's Revolutionary Party (PRP, later renamed the Socialist Party) and the BDA, now renamed the Burma National Army (BNA) and led by his brother-in-law Aung San. Than Tun, unlike Aung San, was not among the six men who founded the CPB on 15 August 1939; Aung San was its first secretary general, with Thakin Soe in charge of mass organisation.

Civil war
When Thakin Soe's Red Flag Communist Party (Alan Ni Party) split from the Communist Party of Burma in early 1946, accusing it of revisionism—"Browderism", named after Earl Browder, leader of the Communist Party of the United States of America—and went underground, Than Tun and the majority of Communists continued to cooperate with the AFPFL. However, the rift over strategy, whether to negotiate with the postwar colonial administration or to continue with the threat of general strikes and armed rebellion till full independence was achieved, came to a head after Aung San and others accepted seats in the Executive Council. In July 1946, Than Tun was forced to resign as general secretary, and the CPB, now dubbed the "White Flag" faction, expelled from the AFPFL the following October, after the CPB had accused Aung San and others of selling out to the British and settling for a "sham" independence.

Independence was declared on 4 January 1948, with the AFPFL, now dominated by the Socialist Party, in power, and U Nu became prime minister, now that Aung San had been assassinated along with most of his cabinet on 19 July 1947, commemorated since as Martyrs' Day. The CPB was charged with inciting revolt after organising a series of strikes and mass rallies, and orders were issued to arrest the leadership on 28 March 1948. Than Tun escaped and led his party underground in order to organize armed revolution, and established guerrilla bases in central Burma from the CPB stronghold at Pyinmana. Than Tun, now Chairman of the CPB, sent a number of party members to China to be trained by Chinese revolutionaries. Some of them returned for the peace parley of 1963 when the CPB sent a delegation to Rangoon to negotiate with the Revolutionary Council government headed by General Ne Win. Than Tun himself remained in the jungle and was reunited with the so-called "Peking returnees" after the peace talks broke down.

Demise
In 1967 he carried out his own cultural revolution, purging the party of "revisionists", and as in China things went out of control before he could finally pull the reins back. Great damage nonetheless had already been done to the CPB's image, particularly the killing of young student leaders who had joined the CPB after the failed peace parley. The country had experienced this kind of treatment of their young only recently in the hands of Ne Win's army in the 7 July 1962 massacre of Rangoon University students during a peaceful protest on campus shortly after the coup d'etat of 2 March 1962. The next year, on 24 September 1968, whilst on the run from government troops, Than Tun was assassinated by a subordinate who later surrendered to General Ne Win's government. The assassin had joined the Communists just two years before as an "army deserter".

Legacy
Than Tun was the only politician that nearly matched Aung San in status among his contemporaries and even the British noticed early on that he was the thinker behind Aung San. He first made his name as the schoolteacher who wrote powerful speeches in both Burmese and English. As a political organiser his skills were unequalled and he had played a pre-eminent role at every stage of Burma's struggle for independence. He was no mere ideologue but a man of extraordinary achievement and energy. Than Tun has come to be regarded as a fallen idol in the modern history of Burma.

References

External links
The Communist Party of Burma
Burma Communist Party's Conspiracy to take over State Power and related information

1911 births
1968 deaths
Communist Party of Burma politicians
Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League politicians
State of Burma
Burmese collaborators with Imperial Japan

Thakin Than Tun


Tod Machover (born November 24, 1953, in Mount Vernon, New York), is a composer and an innovator in the application of technology in music. He is the son of Wilma Machover, a pianist and Carl Machover, a computer scientist.

He was named Director of Musical Research at IRCAM in 1980. Joining the faculty at the new Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1985, he became Professor of Music and Media and Director of the Experimental Media Facility. Currently Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, he is head of the Lab's Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future group and has been co-director of the Things That Think (TTT) and Toys of Tomorrow (TOT) consortia since 1995. In 2006, he was named visiting professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He has composed significant works for Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, Matt Haimovitz, the Ying Quartet, the Boston Pops, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Penn & Teller, and many others, as well as designed and implemented various interactive systems for performance by Peter Gabriel and Prince. Machover gave a keynote lecture at NIME-02, the second international conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, which was held in 2002 at the former Media Lab Europe in Dublin, Ireland, and is a frequent lecturer worldwide. Machover is a Finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his opera Death and the Powers.

Education
He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1971 and received a BM and MM from the Juilliard School in New York where he studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions (1973–1978). He also started his Doctoral studies at Juilliard before being invited as Composer-in-Residence to Pierre Boulez's new Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in 1978.

History
In the fall of 1978, Tod Machover arrived at IRCAM in Paris, and was introduced to Giuseppe di Giugno's digital synthesizer 4 series. Light was premiered at the Metz Festival in November 1979 using 4C, the brain-child of di Giugno's concept that "synthesizers should be made for musicians, not for the people that make them." (Electric Sound, p. 181). In 1981 he composed Fusione Fugace for solo performance on a real-time digital synthesizer, called the 4X machine. At IRCAM 1986 and 1987 he was motivated to score for keyboard and percussion duet with emphasis on extending their performance into many complex sound layers. He composed Valis, again using di Giugno's 4X system to process voices. This desire to enhance the human performance foreshadowed his concept of the hyperinstrument (term coined in 1986). At MIT's Media Lab, he developed methods for taking many more sophisticated measurements of the instrument as well as the performer's expression. He focused on augmenting keyboard instruments, percussion, strings, even the act of conducting, with the goal of developing and implementing new technology in order to expand the function of the musical instruments and their performers. He propelled forward-thinking research in the field of musical performance and interaction using new musical and technological resources. Originally concentrated to the enhancement of virtuosic performance, research has expanded in a direction of building sophisticated interactive musical instruments for non-professional musicians, children, and the general public. He premiered 'Brain Opera' in 1996, an interactive music experience with hyper instruments that aimed at making every human being into a musician.

Hyperinstruments

Hyperviolin
Basically an electric violin, audio output provides raw material for real-time timbre analysis and synthesis techniques. Coupled with an enhanced bow (see Hyperbow), measured properties of both the audio output of the instrument and the bowing gesture of the player create data which controls aspects of the resulting amplified sound.

Hypercello
In addition to bow pressure and string contact, wrist measurements and left-hand fingering-position indicators create measurements which are evaluated and processed in response to the performance.

Hyperbow

Bowing parameters (speed, force, position) are measured and data is processed to create an interaction between performance properties and audio output. Different types or styles of bowing create complex calculations which are conducive to the performance and manipulation of larger structures and compositional shapes.

Hyperpiano
MIDI data generated by performer on a Yamaha Disklavier is manipulated by various Max/MSP processes as accompaniment and augmentation of keyboard performance.

Stage works
 Valis: an opera in two parts (1987) (OCLC ) based on Philip K. Dick's novel VALIS
 Brain Opera (1996), an original, interactive musical experience that included contributions from both on-line participants and live audiences. It toured Europe, Asia, the United States and South America from 1996 to 1998 and was permanently installed at Vienna's House of Music in the spring of 2000.
 Resurrection (1999 at Houston Grand Opera with Joyce DiDonato) (based on Leo Tolstoy's last novel)
 Skellig (2008), an opera based on the novel of the same name by David Almond
 Death and the Powers (2010), an opera with live electronics and robotics developed by the M.I.T. Media Lab. Libretto by Robert Pinsky Powers
 Schoenberg in Hollywood (2018), an opera with film and live electronics commissioned by the Boston Lyric Opera. Libretto by Simon Robson

Compositions

 Ye Gentle Birds (1979) for soprano, mezzo-soprano and wind ensemble
 Fresh Spring (1977) for baritone solo and large chamber ensemble
 With Dadaji in Paradise (1977-'78, rev. 1983) for solo cello
 Two Songs (1978) for soprano and chamber ensemble
 Concerto for Amplified Guitar (1978) for amplified acoustic guitar and large chamber ensemble
 Deplacements (1979) for amplified guitar and computer-generated tape
 Light (1979) for chamber orchestra and computer electronics
 Soft Morning, City! for soprano, double bass, and computer-generated tape
 Winter Variations (1981) for large chamber ensemble
 String Quartet No. 1 (1981)
 Fusione Fugace (1981-'82) for keyboard, two specialized interfaces, and live 4X digital synthesizer
 Chansons d'Amour (1982) for solo piano
 Electric Etudes (1983) for amplified cello, live and pre-recorded computer electronics
 Spectres Parisiens (1983-'84) for flute, horn, cello, chamber orchestra and computer electronics
 Hidden Sparks (1984) for solo violin
 Famine (1985) for four amplified voices and computer-generated sounds
 Desires (1985-'89) for symphony orchestra
 Nature's Breath (1988-'89) for chamber orchestra
 Towards the Center (1988-'89) for amplified flute, clarinet, violin, cello, electronic keyboard and percussion, with five hyperinstrument electronics
 Flora (1989) for pre-recorded soprano and computer-generated sound
 Bug Mudra (1989-'90) for two guitars (electric and amplified-acoustic), electronic percussion, conducting dataglove, and interactive computer electronics
 Begin Again Again … (1991) for Yo-Yo Ma and hypercello Hyperstring Trilogy
 "Song of Penance" (1992) for hyperviola and chamber orchestra Hyperstring Trilogy
 "Forever and Ever" (1993) for hyperviolin and orchestra Hyperstring Trilogy
 Hyperstring Trilogy (1991-'93, rev. 1996-'97) for hypercello, hyperviola, hyperviolin and chamber orchestra Hyperstring Trilogy
 Bounce (1992) for hyperkeyboards, Yamaha Disklavier Grand piano and interactive computer electronics
 He's Our Dad (1997) for soprano, keyboard and computer-generated sound
 Meteor Music (1998) interactive installation Meteorite Museum
 "Sparkler" (2001) for orchestra and interactive computer electronics Sparkler
 "Toy Symphony" (2002/3) for hyperviolin Children's Chorus, Music Toys, and Orchestra Toy Symphony
 "Mixed Messiah" (2004), a 6-minute remix of Handel's Messiah Mixed Messiah
 "I Dreamt A Dream" (2004) for youth chorus, piano and electronics
 "Sea Soaring" (2005) for flute, electronics, and live audience interaction Music Garden
 ...but not simpler... (2005) Not Simpler
 Jeux Deux (2005) for hyperpiano and orchestra Jeux Deux
 Another Life (2006) for nine instruments and electronics
 "VinylCello" (2007) for amplified cello, DJ and live computer electronics
 "Spheres and Splinters" (2010) for hypercello, spatialized audio reproduction, and visuals Spheres and Splinters
 "Open up the House" (2013) for soprano and piano National Opera Center America
 A Toronto Symphony: Concerto for Composer and City (2013) for orchestra and electronics composed with the citizens of Toronto A Toronto Symphony
 Festival City (2013) for orchestra and electronics composed with the public for the Edinburgh International Festival
 Between the Desert and the Deep Blue Sea: A Symphony for Perth (2014) for orchestra and electronics composed with the public for the Perth International Arts Festival
 Breathless (2014) for flute, orchestra and electronics Bemidji Symphony Orchestra
 Time and Space (2015) for orchestra, inspired by the essays of Michel de Montaigne
 A Symphony for Our Times (2015) for live piano and recorded orchestra and electronics, for the closing performance of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2015
 Restructures (2015) for two pianos and electronics, tribute to Pierre Boulez premiered at the 2015 Lucerne Festival
 Eine Sinfonie für Luzern (2015) for orchestra and electronics, created with the public for the 2015 Lucerne Festival
 Fensadense (2015) for ten musicians and hyperinstruments with live electronics, premiered at the 2015 Lucerne Festivalra
 "Symphony in D" (2015) for orchestra, voice, additional performers and electronics, premiered by the Detroit Symphony
 "Philadelphia Voices" (2018) for four choirs, to be premiered by Westminster Choir College's Symphonic Choir at the Kimmel Center and Carnegie Hall.

Journal articles

Awards
 Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France (1995)
 DigiGlobe Prize in Interactive Media, Germany (1998)
 Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology and the Ray Kurzweil Award of Technology in Music, USA (2003)
 Charles Steinmetz Prize from IEEE and Union College, "USA" (2007)
 Pulitzer Prize in Music Finalist for "Death and the Powers" (2012)
 Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Award for Arts Advocacy (2013)
 2016 Composer of the Year, Musical America

References

External links

 Web page
 Faculty profile
 Research & Projects
 Opera of the Future Blog
 NewMusicBox
 Shaping Minds Musically
 Music-Making for All
 CNN Video Documentary 1/07
 "My Cello" by Tod Machover in Sherry Turkle's book, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, MIT Press 2007.
 Tod Machover Playlist Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler radio show April 16, 2003

 "Inventing instruments that unlock new music" (TED2008)
 Toy Story: An MIT Project Helps Musical Novices Express Themselves article in Andante (online magazine), September 5, 2002 (archived 2007)

1953 births
20th-century classical composers
21st-century American composers
21st-century classical composers
Academics of the Royal Academy of Music
American classical composers
American male classical composers
American opera composers
Living people
Male opera composers
MIT Media Lab people
20th-century American composers
20th-century American male musicians
21st-century American male musicians

Tod Machover