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Wikipedia’s article on Benjamin Franklin starts this way:

Benjamin Franklin was an American polymath active as a physicist, philosopher, statesman and inventor.

The article goes on to list (some of) his other achievements, including his role as a writer, and as the founder of institutions such as the American Philosophical Society and what became the University of Pennsylvania. It omits many other things, including his contributions as an orthoepist and phonetician .

Franklin did none of this because he was trained to do it or hired to do it, but because he was curious about the world around him, and followed up in unexpected and consequential ways on chance encounters both common and rare.

Victor Mair was also active throughout his life in many different intellectual and cultural and physical areas.…