The writing life

Congratulations to all the Pulitzer Prize winners! And special congratz to The Los Angeles Times for its writers sweep, 5 prizes. Check out these prize-winning (and prize-deserving) pieces by: Bill Stall for Editorial Writing, in his series "Reinventing California" (on what's wrong with the state's government, how it got that way and how to fix it -- click on headlines to read each complete editorial); the 3-part series The Wal-Mart Effect, prize for national reporting, by Abigai Goldman, Nancy Cleeland, Evelyn Iritani & Tyler Marshall; Southern California wildfire reporting by a whole crew of reporters, and more. The L.A. Times also has links to the winners (there were a few) who worked for other newspapers, and to a story on Edward P. Jones, debut novelist who won for The Known World. (For a fuller story, see report in the NYT).

The New York Times won the Public Service Pulitzer for its excellent series, When Workers Die by David Barstow and Lowel Bergman. Fortunately, both papers, the L.A. Times and the NYT, are letting you read their prize-winners for free, at least for now.

Elsewhere the NYT, there is this comment on the journalistic life, embedded in an otherwise rather silly and repetitive piece by James Gorman in the science section about how many antidepressants Americans are taking. Gorman notes, "The result does not yet seem to be the epidemic of dull, well-managed emotionless humanity that some forecasters have worried about. For instance, among professionals in journalism and publishing in the New York metropolitan area, who no doubt take as much Zoloft per capita as anyone on the planet, it is no small trick to find someone who is either calm or happy."

Now that's depressing.