The Pulitizer winners in Letters & Drama

FICTION
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

DRAMA
Doubt, a parable by John Patrick Shanley

HISTORY
Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press)

BIOGRAPHY
de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Alfred A. Knopf)

POETRY
Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser (Copper Canyon Press)

GENERAL NON-FICTION
Ghost Wars by Steve Coll (The Penguin Press)

MUSIC
Second Concerto for Orchestra by Steven Stucky (Theodore Presser Company)

I know what you mean (cf., last line)

One popular theory is that he comes from Planet Brainiac, where he was such a dunce he had to be exiled to Earth.

My own theory is that Steve has that very rare mental power known as the ability to concentrate. When I peppered him with questions last night about the secrets of his craft, he confessed to the ability to see the shape of a narrative. He said the structure of the book came to him one day while he was jogging — how each part of the book would begin and end, and how the narrative would culminate in the events of Sept. 10, 2001.

Some of us can’t even get our brains around an entire blog item.

— Joel Achenbach writing about collegue and Pulitzer winner Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars

Fort Raleigh National Historic Site …

was established on this date in 1941. According to the National Park Service:

The first English attempts at colonization in the New World (1585-1587) are commemorated here. These efforts, sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh, ended with the disappearance of 116 men, women and children (including two that were born in the New World). The fate of this “lost colony” remains a mystery to this day. The Park was established in 1941, and enlarged in 1990 by Public Law 1001-603 to include the preservation of Native American culture, The American Civil War, the Freedman’s Colony, and the activities of radio pioneer Reginald Fessenden. The park is also home to the outdoor symphonic drama THE LOST COLONY, performed in the Waterside Theatre during the summer since 1937.

And, to NewMexiKen’s memory, home as well to an hellacious number of mosquitoes.

Winners

From The Albuquerque Tribune:

You win some, you lose some.

Until Monday, La Cueva’s Seth Johnson and Zach Arnett had defied that maxim.

Johnson and Arnett were around for all 70 games of La Cueva’s national record-setting win streak. They were freshmen when the streak began. They were sophomores and juniors when La Cueva won consecutive state baseball titles, going undefeated along the way.

And they are seniors this year, as La Cueva began 12-0 before falling 17-8 to Rio Grande on Monday.

But 70 wins tell only part of their story. Arnett and Johnson also played varsity football for the Bears, who have won 26 straight games and two consecutive state Class 5A titles.

Their win streak was really 96 games.

Before Monday, neither player had lost a high school football or baseball game since La Cueva fell 10-0 to Clovis in the quarterfinals of the 2002 state football playoffs.

“We’re having to work around them”

Report from The Arizona Daily Star:

In the first few days of the Minuteman Project, volunteers have been slowing illegal immigration into the Naco area. They’ve accomplished that with the help of an unlikely ally: Mexico.

Eager to avoid confrontations between volunteers and its people, Mexico is sweeping the area south of the Minuteman Project clear of migrants. …

What Minuteman volunteers have succeeded in doing is setting off false alarms by tripping ground sensors on the border, [Border Patrol spokesman Andy Adame] said.

“We’re having to work around them instead of concentrating on the actual border where we need to work,” Adame said.

W-A-T-E-R

According to The Writer’s Almanac:

On this day in 1887, teacher Annie Sullivan taught her blind and deaf student Helen Keller that the spelled-out letters “W-A-T-E-R” meant the liquid that flowed out of the pump.

NewMexiKen supposes that these days “W-A-T-E-R” would mean that liquid flows out of a plastic bottle. Not long ago I saw The Miracle Worker with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Catch it if you get a chance. Great story, incredible Oscar-winning performances by both Bancroft and Duke.

It’s the birthday

… of Colin Powell. He’s 68.

Actress Bette Davis was born on this date in 1908. She died in 1989.

Conductor Herbert von Karajan was also born on this date in 1908 and he, too, died in 1989.

Joseph Lister was born on this date in 1827. His principle that bacteria must never enter a surgical incision was a breakthrough for modern surgery. Lister died in 1912. (One assumes Listerine is named for him.)

Another point of view

From an assessment of Pope John Paul II by Virginia Heffernan in The New York Times:

But Mr. [James] Carroll’s most forceful point is one that nearly all of television’s elegies have obscured in all their effort to cast John Paul II as, above all, a rock star.

In short, he said the pope was always suspicious about-and often contemptuous of-the very basis of American life. As Mr. Carroll put it, “He’s profoundly suspicious of democracy.”

Mr. Carroll continued, “He’s a man of tremendous modern sensibility, capable of being at home with rock musicians and young people, and yet he has staked everything on protecting a view of the church that has it roots in the Middle Ages.”

Seeing the light

Excerpt from an editorial in Scientific American:

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Of course, the editorial was published April First.

Pointer from Paul Krugman