Caroline Shaw is a 30 year old composer, violinist, and singer. Yesterday, she also became the youngest person ever, and one of the few women, to
receive the Pulitzer Prize for music for her composition
Partita for 8 Voices. The work features four baroque inspired movements that were influenced by the violin music of Bach, and yet despite the baroque title, Partita is still thoroughly modern. The Pulitzer jury
described it as a "highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects."
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posted by fremen
on Apr 16, 2013 -
45 comments
"
If you study all of the recent Pulitzer winners in the cartooning category, you’ll see that single-panel editorial cartoons are an increasingly timeworn form. Even the best ones traffic in blunt, one-dimensional jokes, rarely exhibiting nuance, irony, or subtext."
Farhad Manjoo argues that the Pulitzer should honor "infographics and interactive visualizations... [which] derive their power from real, often surprising data that’s presented, ideally, in a simple, understandable way."
posted by The corpse in the library
on Apr 21, 2012 -
35 comments
Guess who won the 2012 Pulitzer for Fiction. Nobody.
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in this category were: "Train Dreams," by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a novella about a day laborer in the old American West, bearing witness to terrors and glories with compassionate, heartbreaking calm; "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopf), an adventure tale about an eccentric family adrift in its failing alligator-wrestling theme park, told by a 13-year-old heroine wise beyond her years; and "The Pale King," by the late David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company), a posthumously completed novel, animated by grand ambition, that explores boredom and bureaucracy in the American workplace.
posted by kenaldo
on Apr 16, 2012 -
85 comments
Final Salute. Between 2004 and 2005, "Rocky Mountain News reporter Jim Sheeler and photographer Todd Heisler spent a year with the Marines stationed at Aurora's Buckley Air Force Base who have found themselves called upon to notify families of the deaths of their sons in Iraq. In each case in this story, the families agreed to let Sheeler and Heisler chronicle their loss and grief. They wanted people to know their sons, the men and women who brought them home, and the bond of traditions more than 200 years old that unite them. Though readers are led through the story by the white-gloved hand of Maj. Steve Beck, he remains a reluctant hero. He is, he insists, only a small part of the massive mosaic that is the Marine Corps."
The full story ran on Veteran's Day, 2005 and won two Pulitzer Prizes: one for
Feature Photography, another for
feature writing in 2006. A nice single-page version of one section:
Katherine Cathey and 2nd Lt. James J. Cathey (
via.) The Rocky Mountain News closed in 2009.
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posted by zarq
on Oct 12, 2011 -
12 comments
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting supports journalists covering dangerous areas and underreported issues on all continents except Antartica, as is shown by
this handy Google map showing all 45
projects. Among the projects are
Caucasus, focusing on the easternmost part of Europe where just today conflict broke out,
Scars and Stripes: Liberian Youth After the War,
The Soybean Wars, about the booming demand for soybeans in South America,
Alaska, global warming and its effects on Alaskan glaciers,
Understanding Iran looks at ordinary Iranians,
and Iraq: Death of a Nation? (Revisited). Links to stories are generally in sidebars on the left and right. The Pulitzer Center also has a blog called
Untold Stroies which is frequently updated and keeps tabs on all 45 projects as well as related events, such as the recent
TED Talk by PRI CEO Alisa Miller on the paltry reporting of international issues in American media with arresting graphs and visuals, which serves to place the mission of the Pulitzer Center in context.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 8, 2008 -
5 comments
Lion Heart is the nickname given to Saleh Khalaf, a nine year old boy maimed by an explosion in Iraq. Deanne Fitzmaurice's photo essay about his ongoing recovery won the
2005 Pultizer Prize for Feature Photography.
posted by McGuillicuddy
on Apr 22, 2005 -
19 comments
"Now America is reappraising the battlefield, delaying the war, maybe a week and rewriting the war plan. The first plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another plan." Seems patently obvious, no? But tell Iraqi state television that and suddenly you're speaking from "a position of complete ignorance," according to the White House.
Peter Arnett,
highly respected, Pulitzer Prize winner and the first journalist to
interview Osama Bin Laden on film, wouldn't back down the
last time a network caved into craven submission at hands of the American military, and
he's been sacked by NBC/MSNBC for again refusing to do so. There's no First Amendment case, obviously, and no real surprise that the military would be exerting pressure to maintain control over information, but does the firing of high-profile Arnett for the repeating the obvious increase
anybody's confidence that we're hearing anything resembling the truth?
posted by JollyWanker
on Mar 31, 2003 -
30 comments
Sometimes, the good guys still win... Lost in the higher profile
Elianapalooza with regard to the Pulitzer Prizes was the editorial writing prize awarded to the relatively small Rutland (VT) Herald's David Moats, who championed the recognition of same-sex couples on an equal legal footing with inter-sex couples. Quietly, eloquently but always with the utmost conviction, Moats' series of editorials together form a compelling, difficult to refute argument, enabling his Pulitzer victory over the Arizona Republic and the New York Times.
posted by m.polo
on Apr 18, 2001 -
2 comments
![this cartoon](http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/04/07/nyregion/07cnd-puli2.184.gif"){kind=link}