Who won the Pulitzer Prize?

Here's the full list. What jumps out at me is that no award was given in the "feature writing" category. The nominees were:

Scott Farwell of The Dallas Morning News
For his story about a young woman's struggle to live a normal life after years of ghastly child abuse, an examination of human resilience in the face of depravity.

Christopher Goffard of Los Angeles Times
For his account of an ex-police officer’s nine-day killing spree in Southern California, notable for its pacing, character development and rich detail.

Mark Johnson of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
For his meticulously told tale about a group of first-year medical students in their gross anatomy class and the relationships they develop with one another and the nameless corpse on the table, an account enhanced by multimedia elements.

So: 1. human resilience in the face of depravity, 2. pacing, character development and rich detail, and 3. meticulously told tale with multimedia elements. Pick one! I pick the Wisconsin one, which you can read here:

As the professors move about demonstrating proper technique, a difference becomes clear. The students cut delicately, almost tentatively.

The professors cut briskly. They tug at skin. They dig their fingers beneath muscle or other tissue in order to reach the structures beneath.

"The idea is to find the things," explains associate professor, David Bolender, addressing the students at Table 1. "You don't need to make the dissection look like a picture in an atlas." 

Find things!

ADDED: The NYT puts up a slide show for the photography winners, Tyler Hicks (for breaking news, covering the attack on the mall in Nairobi) and Josh Haner (for feature photography showing the recovery of persons injured in the Boston Marathon bombing). Beautiful work by both Hicks and Haner. I am in awe.

The Crack Emcee is on the radio again.

Listen here. [UPDATE: The live broadcast is over now. But you can stream or download it here.]

With Uncle Ray. And here's the link to Ray's top 100 albums of all time, which they are counting down. Ray asks Crack what would be on Crack's top 100 albums of all time, and Crack says "Zappa, Zappa, and more Zappa."

ADDED: "What do you have in South Central for breakfast?" asks Ray, and Crack says: "Toast." Later: "How about bread, oatmeal, and hot dogs for breakfast?"

AND: Crack and Ray are debating the age-old music question: "Tusk" or "Rumours"?

UPDATE: Crack says "Meade, Ann, this is for you," as the Aretha Franklin track (from "Lady Soul," #59) begins, and I get the joke, which is that one time I used the word "bellyaching" to describe soul music, and he's never let me forget it. I think the context of my remark was that when I was a teenager in the 1960s, I preferred music that felt more like it was about teenagers in love than the heavy, troubled relationships of adults. Ah, here it is. It all started when Meade was playing the the Garnet Mimms version of "Cry Baby," and I said:

I remember when that song... was on the radio. It was 1963. I was 12. I listened to top 40 AM radio, and I liked the songs that felt like they were about teenagers. There was a brightness and a happiness to the songs that dominated the top 40. Even the songs about crying. The biggest song about crying in 1963 was "It's My Party." Lesley Gore is gloriously triumphant in her claim of the right to cry.

"Cry Baby" seemed to come from a dreary 1950s world of old people and their problems. Meade says he loved music like that. Maybe that look into the weighty, complicated lives of adults was enticing to some really young radio listeners, but I wanted it on a different station. Here, I said, here's my answer to that "Cry Baby":

[Embedded video: The Pretenders, "Stop Your Sobbing."]

I love the original Kinks version too, and you'd better believe I had all the early Kinks albums. Kinks, Kinda Kinks, and Kinks Kontroversy. I still love that kind of [kinda] thing. It still appeals to me more than the anguished bellyaching of soul music.

Boldface added.

John Wayne "upbraided star Kirk Douglas for playing the part of Vincent van Gogh like a 'weak queer.'"

"How can you play a part like that? There’s so few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters," Wayne said.

“It’s all make-believe, John,” a dumbfounded Douglas replied. “It isn’t real. You’re not really John Wayne, you know.”

Here's a clip from "Lust for Life," the movie that brought out the homophobia in John Wayne. Vincent and his dinner date, Gauguin/Anthony Quinn, are having a nice conversation about which other artists to invite to their French country home, and when Vincent brings up Millet — Millet! — it erupts into a lover's quarrel about art and emotion. Vincent adores Millet, who, he says, "uses paint to express the word of God," and Gauguin snaps that "he should have been a preacher, not a painter." Then it's on to "If there's one thing I despise, it's emotionalism in painting," a none-too-subtle attack on Vincent that escalates into accusations of the "You paint too fast"/"You look too fast" kind.

"Collapses occur when people lose confidence. That is now happening in China."

"Premier Li Keqiang has a few tools at his disposal, but they look insufficient to stop a general collapse of property prices across the country."

The problems, deferred from late 2008 with massive state spending, have simply become too large. And we must remember that he works inside a complex, collective political system that is generally unable to meet challenges swiftly.

Wisconsin GOP convention will vote on "Wisconsin's right, under extreme circumstances, to secede."

"A version of the so-called 'state sovereignty' resolution was first OK'd last month by one of the state GOP's eight regional caucuses as an assertion of the state's 10th Amendment rights," Daniel Bice reports in the Milwaukee State Journal.

Top Republican officials hoped to kill the fringe proposal during a meeting of the resolutions panel at the Hyatt Hotel in Milwaukee on April 5. Instead, the committee made a few edits to the resolution and adopted it on a split vote....

Governor Scott Walker said: "I don't think that one aligns with where most Republican officials are in the state of Wisconsin — certainly not with me."

"Folks in Pleasant Grove, Utah, say they knew her pretty well. But somehow they didn’t know her well enough..."

"... to notice how often she got pregnant — seven times in recent years. This weekend they found out, in the most gruesome way imaginable."

How do people fail to notice 7 full-term pregnancies? Or is it that they don't want to admit that they had 7 extended opportunities to observe that a baby who should have been there was not there and they let it go?

The woman, Megan Huntsman, has left us with a striking and memorable mugshot:



She looks — among other things — surprised. If she did what she's accused of, I can see why she's surprised that what she's been doing has — after 7 iterations — been noticed.

IN THE COMMENTS: Illuninati wrote:

The article doesn't provide enough information to know what happened. Were these the products of miscarriages? Did she kill full term babies?

I answered:

I wrote "full-term" based on the article's saying she's "accused of killing her babies after giving birth to them."

You don't say that a woman who's had a miscarriage has "given birth." But I guess "full-term" assumes they were not premature. Maybe they were premature and born alive but they failed to survive. Perhaps she got pregnant over and over trying to deal with some problem that all the babies had, some medical mystery that she never was able to get help about and she hid the dead bodies out of grief and shame.

Did Althouse blog about baseball in the days before she aligned with Meade?

In the comments to the previous post — "Baseball baby" — Chance wrote:

It is interesting to see Meade's effect on Althouse's preferences. I think I've been reading this blog since 2004 and I can't really imagine Althouse watching baseball. The process has been slow and subtle. I'm sure this happens in most relationships, but it is fun to see how it percolates up into the blog.

This is the 203rd post with the tag "baseball," and 26 of them pre-date Meade. What did I blog about baseball, pre-Meade? Here are 16 things:

March 4, 2004: "Should we swoon over John Kerry because he responded to Dowd's culture questions with long, long answers, unlike George Bush, who, asked to name his favorite 'cultural experience,' said 'baseball'?"

June 7, 2005: "I know what it's like to need to breastfeed and be in a situation where there's nowhere private to go. One time, back in the early 80s, I breastfed my baby at the Baseball Hall of Fame. I remember feeling I was doing something really wrong and that I was about to be discovered at any point and treated harshly."

Baseball baby.

Photogenic baby gives its thoughts on the @Brewers' fast start. GIF: http://t.co/zSWXnVCqTU #ShockedBaby
— MLB (@MLB) April 13, 2014

Does George Will know what young people today say about race as a joke and that they now find accusations of racism "a national mirth"?

He said this on today's "Fox News Sunday":

Look, liberalism has a kind of Tourette's syndrome these days. It's just constantly saying the word "racism" and "racist."...

There is a kind of intellectual poverty now. Liberalism hasn't had a new idea since the 1960s except ObamaCare and the country doesn't like it. Foreign policy is a shambles from Russia to Iran to Syria to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And recovery is unprecedentedly bad. So what do you do? You say anyone who criticizes us is a racist. It's become a joke among young people. You go to a campus where this kind of political correctness reins [sic], and some young person will say looks like it's going to rain. The person listening says, you're a racist. I mean it's so inappropriate. The constant implication of this that it is, I think, becoming a national mirth.

Based on hearing Will's tone of voice, it's clear — I think! — that Will meant it would work amongst today's college kids to say "You're a racist" as a punchline when somebody says something obviously race-neutral (such as "looks like it's going to rain"). "You're a racist" has been overused to the point where it's not just boring or unbelievable, but a laugh line — a national mirth.

Somehow, I find it hard to believe that George Will is out and about at the colleges getting a real feel for what the young folk find amusing. I sort of find it amusing myself to hear George Will purporting to punditize on the subject of current college humor trends, but it's actually not that amusing, because an old white guy declaring the subject of race to have crossed over from serious to some kind of joke — "a national mirth" — really isn't funny.

Andrea Mitchell asks Kathleen Sebelius: "Along the way, what was your low point?"

On "Meet the Press" this morning. And Sebelius said:

Oh, Andrea, it would have to be the time I curled up into a little ball and cried all day. If it weren't for all the ice cream... people say I wasn't good at planning for all the things that could go wrong, but I did have the foresight to load the freezer with chocolate-chip Haagen Dazs... I cried and cried and consoled myself with ice cream and I tell you, Andrea, if it weren't for all that ice cream, I would have committed suicide.

Actually, that's not what Sebelius said. That's what I said watching "Meet the Press" and thinking Andrea Mitchell had resorted to an absurdly girlie question.

What Sebelius actually said was: "Well, I would say that the eight weeks where the site was not functioning well for the vast majority of people was a pretty dismal time. And I was frankly hoping and watching and measuring.... " etc. etc. Pretty dismal, but not emotional in any personal way.

"As the movement grew by the day, and demonstrators rallied together, bonding by campfires at night..."

At the Cliven Bundy standoff...

I'd like to hear more details of the bonding by campfires. I'm not commenting on the underlying dispute between rancher and the Bureau of Land Management, but I'm interested in the culture that develops within a protest movement because I observed, first hand, during the Wisconsin protests of 2011, how anti-government ideation swirls within an insular protest group that is camped out together around the clock.

I also see a similarity between the Bundy standoff and the Wisconsin protests in the government decision to back off, seemingly to avoid exacerbating the intense emotions and giving the protesters more to protest about.

ADDED: Meade, proofreading for me, laughs when he gets to the line "I'd like to hear more details of the bonding by campfires." He says: "I don't know if you meant that to be funny." And I say: "Yeah, in a way, I did. I mean, I'm thinking of campfire songs and ghost stories... but about the government."

The Wisconsin protesters had their songs...

"What a double play to get out of that one!"

Video.

Note Henderson is the pitcher.

Have you been following the Brewers? It's an 8-game winning streak.

ADDED: Here's another video from last night's game, with a thrilling keeping of the toe on first base in the 9th inning. Fabulous toe work by Mark Reynolds.

"Lamb is more Nutritious than any kind of Poultry, Mutton than Lamb, Veal than Mutton, and Beef than Veal..."

"... But Pork is more Nutricious than any of these; for the Juices of Pork, which is more like Human Flesh than any other Flesh is, are more adapted to the Nourishment of a Human Body than the Juices of any other Flesh."

"I'm angry that my weird, nerdy hobby has been coopted..."

"... by other people's weird, nerdy hobby."

"Katherine Heigl (remember her?) probably needed some cash..."

"... so she filed a $6M lawsuit against Duane Reade for posting a picture of her carrying one of the drugstore’s bags on Twitter."

Why I didn't blog about the shoe thrown at Hillary Clinton...

... but I'm blogging about it now that I see this, in The Daily News:

Before a wig-wearing nutjob threw a shoe at Hillary Clinton... Alison Ernst, 36...  arrived in a Colorado courtroom with her head shaved while wearing a red dress before declaring she held evidence “vital to the defense of James Holmes.”

Holmes, with his wig-like orange hair, shot 12 moviegoers to death and wounded many others back in 2012. After the Holmes hearing, Ernst filed a lawsuit that included this text:

"James enters my head like Dennis Quaid in ‘Innerspace’ and he zooms to my heart and plays with it and forces me to care for him... I seek a restraining order to stop Holmes from entering my mind through subliminal messaging and causing me to be obsessed with him on a daily basis."

None of this is cute or amusing or an occasion for political posturing. There are deranged individuals out and about, and we should try to help them or at least stop them before they do serious violence. When I first heard about the shoe-throwing, I wanted to do what I could to deprive this person of attention. This kind of acting out toward a political figure is a reminder of the risks taken by everyone who offers herself (or himself) up to public service. You may think we should disrespect those who seek power. I do too. But to strike out physically is a different matter. Even when the action seems more symbolic than dangerous — like a shoe-throwing — it is a violent assault, and it is on a continuum with assassination, the threat any political candidate or office holder lives with continually.

I avoided reading other news articles and blog posts about Ernst, but I had the feeling that there would be comparisons to the time someone threw a shoe at George Bush, that there would be efforts to score points claiming that the amusement or justification expressed at the attack on Bush made it appropriate to turn the tables and laugh or cheer at the attack on Hillary. Maybe no one wrote anything like that, but aversion to that kind of commentary kept me away from this story.

For the record, I didn't want to talk about the shoe thrown at Bush either.

I'm writing about the Hillary incident now because the connection to James Holmes brings some focus to the real danger out there.