The Big Picture

Author and journalist Walter Isaacson is coming home. A former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time as well as the author of biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Henry Kissinger, Albert Einstein, and most recently Leonardo da Vinci, Isaacson is eager to return to New Orleans and take part in the city’s civic life: “At a time like this, with politics so dysfunctional and poisoned, the local level is where things get done.”

Recently appointed the University Professor of History at Tulane, Isaacson will be teaching courses dealing with the history of ideas and technology. Young minds can be surprising, he said; while kids entering college may not have the knee-jerk opinions adults often develop, they also seldom have much grounding in history. Isaacson pointed to the recency of major developments in technology, like widespread Internet use. “They don’t know that’s new,” he said. He looks forward to showing students how to look for patterns in history—the better to see what may be coming up. 

Isaacson’s teaching and writing philosophies share the basic premise of marrying research and narrative. The facts have to be there, but so does an overarching story, which helps readers and students see processes in action (and remain engaged). This idea of contrasting but complementary specialization and generalization, joining the nitty-gritty to the big picture, informed his work as a “floater” early in his tenure at Time, where he would move between the various reporting departments as needed. The concept also affected his ideas about Leonardo da Vinci as he wrote his recent biography. Isaacson described da Vinci as a deeply curious man, who would “get up in the morning and make a list of what he wanted to know. Not only ‘why is the sky blue,’ but how to paint that blue sky.”

Da Vinci, the greatest of the Renaissance men, had interests and areas of expertise beyond even the many we remember him for; he began his career as a theatrical designer and producer of court pageantry—we can see the heritage of this first career in the theatrical staging of paintings like The Last Supper. For Isaacson, da Vinci was the last great generalist, the leading light of the last generation of thinkers who could claim to be at the forefront of all or most areas of knowledge before the frontiers of learning passed beyond the range of any one human being. In a world full of increased specialization, this example of a great generalist may be just what we need.