2022 Pulitzer Prizes
pulitzer.org
pulitzer.org
This is the kind of thing people are pushing back against, there's just more to life than exploring identity issues. Not that they aren't somewhat important, but there are indeed other things to talk about.
Please, pick, at random, any date on that page and you can say the same thing about any of the subject matters. Here. I just did it. 2003. Middlesex. Book about a girl that's not a girl. 1982. Rabbit Is Rich. Book from a series that explores drugs, identity, religion, this one has alcoholism themes. 1976. Humboldt's Gift. Story about commodification and culture.
The whole point of the Pulitzer for books novels and music is to encourage and highlight the unique stuff. The fact that they may reflect the current themes of those times should not be surprising or bothersome.
The thing is identity is so broad that you can fit anything as being 'identity' media, especially the kind of emotionally compelling/captivating works that would win a Pulitzer.
I wish there was some metric like Oscar's viewership for Pulitzer, so we could chart the decline of their prestige in recent years.
The closest thing I can think of right now is Google n-grams: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Pulitzer&year_...
The post i commented on described the topic as "injustice" and argued that making the complaint is akin to asking to ignore injustice, and therefor morally wrong. I find that an eristic argument and engage it with logic, because i strongly dislike such arguments.
Please note that i have no strong opinion whether the complaint is objectively true, complete nonsense, or only the subjective understanding of the person making the complaint. I do not have such an opinion, because i have not read any one of the winning books and will not make any argument about their content or major themes based on one sentence summaries.
People constantly worried they might be exposed to “identity” are even more annoying than those who won’t stop talking about the subject. I have seen several children’s novels where the characters tangentially discussed their ancestors’ origins or took part in cultural traditions, or the book incidentally featured a disabled character or a gay character or a homeless character, and then random Amazon reviewers with a chip on their shoulder will complain about how this is all too “woke” for them.
Also, i don't particularly care about "People", you may say you have seen them, but they could all be made of straw as far as i know. If you think you can convince me by denouncing the top poster, you must have missed my entire point about eristic. I do however agree that people on all sides of every discussion can be stupefyingly annoying.
And i agree that the absolute claim seems unlikely. When looking for a counter example I would pick up the history winner about Cuba, but again i would prefer to read it first before talking about it. In a debate we could ask the one making the argument to provide detailed reviews of all the books, however we would still need to read them to verify the answer. And that doesn't work well in internet debates where it is normal for people to shout bold claims and leave.
The supposed “scandal” is that the candidate’s son tried to set up a meeting between his boss and his father, which meeting either never happened or was no more than a few minutes long, and never demonstrated any whiff of illegality or even unethical behavior by the candidate. That is hinted at by some (apparently real) emails which were obtained by an unknown method [but note the company had been hacked by Russian military intelligence in the recent past] and then placed on a hard drive by unknown actors for unknown reasons, along with a highly suspicious (and now impossible to validate, because the hard drive was handled so sloppily) story about a laptop abandoned to a legally blind repair shop owner. This hard drive eventually found its way to Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.
“Unqualified relative of a powerful/famous person with mediocre talent/skills talks up his importance and connections to get a fancy job” is an everyday occurrence in the USA (and around the world). As an obvious example, look at George W. Bush’s entire pre-presidential career (or thousands of family/friends of Governors, Senators, CEOs, ...). It’s a bummer that we can’t all have a famous dad to put on our resumés, but unless some actual corrupt dealing happens, there’s nothing unusual or scandalous about this. But despite there being no serious story here, it has been repeated ad nauseam by every hack propaganda rag for the past year and a half to the point that millions of faithful conspiracy theorists are convinced of its significance.
Meanwhile the (now former) president’s son in law was having his bankrupt family business bailed out by oil sheikhs to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars (and more recently has been put in charge of a $2 billion investment fund) as direct payback for altering US government policy to help those patrons, and nobody involved in this laptop story batted an eye. (Not to mention, the former president himself spent his whole term in office shaking down everyone he could for cash and political favors, including the US federal government and various foreign leaders.) What a joke.
> Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post. ¶ The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said.[...] ¶ Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years.
How those emails (and other materials) were originally obtained and how they made their way onto the hard drive in question is impossible to determine.
Because there isn’t really much story or scandal in the emails themselves (similar to the Blumenthal and Podesta hacked email leaks from 2016), the whole “conspiracy coverup” angle has been played up endlessly by breathless propagandists.
But even if you take a leap and assume that the laptop story is true precisely as claimed, the better explanation for the media reaction is: serious media outlets who were repeatedly burned by credulously reprinting Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon’s (later proven false) claims wised up and decided to be a bit more careful this time.
Come on man, we all know the reason the story [1] was suppressed [2] is that the establishment, rightly or not, was afraid of another four years of Trump. Then, they made up all kinds of post-facto reasons for it (policy against hacked material, etc.).
[1]: Which, as you correctly mentioned earlier, was intended to swing votes.
[2]: Not only from the mainstream media, but also from social media, to the extent you couldn't send it in DMs to others.
The Pulitzer is an American award. To talk about American culture is to talk about race. Only it isn't that obvious when you're the one that's considered default. The rest of us don't get a choice.
A fictional story about the Netanyahus
A recasting of Hamlet in the American South
The origin of a treaty in a conflict between early colonists and indigenous peoples & A 500-year history of Cuba (tie)
Biography of a man living in the Jim Crow era
Poems about working class life in the Rust Belt
Book-length nonfiction about growing up homeless and poor
And there are plenty of counter-examples in the runners up too. It's not even close to every single book. There are other things to talk about, and talking about them won Pulitzers.
The Netanyahus: "historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience"
Fat Ham: "grapple[s] with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty"
Covered with Nigh: "A gripping account of Indigenous justice"
And for the rest, I think the description you provided hints that collective identity is an important element of the books. (except perhaps for "Cuba: An American History" and "Invisible Child")
So it seems like this is the winning piece: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-james-webb-space-te...
Using NYT to figure out the truth while an event is ongoing is usually no better than other NYT-esque media outlets.
Indeed. Zero questions remaining. I understand unflinchingly, whatever that is.
I'm not the biggest Bezos or Amazon fan, but his hands-off approach for The Washington Post has been reported on -- and continually monitored -- by multiple news organizations since he purchased it years ago. If he stepped in and blocked a story, whether it was about him, Amazon or something else, people would know about it.
0 out of 3 is not a good record.
David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner of The New York Times For an exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges.
Staff of The Wall Street Journal For uncovering President Trump’s secret payoffs to two women during his campaign who claimed to have had affairs with him, and the web of supporters who facilitated the transactions, triggering criminal inquiries and calls for impeachment.
Staffs of The New York Times and The Washington Post For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.
Of the three investigations you picked, the first was about tax "dodging" which is not necessarily illegal. From the second investigation, I'll pull one quote for you:
> Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes, including tax evasion and making false statements to a bank, capping a monthslong investigation into his business dealings and work as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer. For the president, it opens up a perilous new legal front.
For the third investigation on Russian interference, there are a whole pile of convictions you can look up if you're interested. I think Paul Manafort and Roger Stone are the biggest names you may be familiar with.
Lisa Falkenberg, Michael Lindenberger, Joe Holley and Luis Carrasco of the Houston Chronicle
For a campaign that, with original reporting, revealed voter suppression tactics, rejected the myth of widespread voter fraud and argued for sensible voting reforms.
a) speculative reporting that turned out to have less basis in reality than was initially thought (to the point that top-tier award-winning journalism wasn't actually true), or
b) a disconnect between facts on the ground as reported by journalists, and our individual, societal, or governmental inability to effect change based on those facts
My personal take is that it's probably a combination of the two. A bunch of anonymous sources cited by the press throughout Trump's presidency were either never corroborated by public sources, or were flatly proven to be incorrect as more facts came out. But there was also a TON of totally credible, well-sourced journalism in that era that the US federal and state governments have completely ignored, often with the support of their constituents who dismiss even the absolute best reporting as "fake news."
Looking at the 2022 winners, it's personally disheartening for me to think how much of what's listed there will just continue on as the status quo. Though as a counterpoint, it also looks like there's some wins that were already corrected, like the Florida battery plant exposé that (if I take the Pulitzer description here at face value) resulted in new safety measures to protect workers.
The only examples I can think of revolve around sloppy science reporting w.r.t. non-peer-reviewed covid studies, but the press got the big picture right on that, eventually.