The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday, amazingly there were two novels chosen for the award for fiction.

Pulitzer Awards for Books, Drama and Music

Fiction

"Demon Copperhead," by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

"Trust," by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books)

Finalist:

"The Immortal King Rao," by Vauhini Vara (W. W. Norton & Company)

Drama

"English," by Sanaz Toossi

Finalists:

"On Sugarland," by Aleshea Harris

"The Far Country," by Lloyd Suh

History

"Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power," by Jefferson Cowie (Basic Books)

Finalists:

"Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America," by Michael John Witgen (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press)

"Watergate: A New History," by Garrett M. Graff (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

Biography

"G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century," by Beverly Gage (Viking)

Finalists:

"His Name is George Floyd," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking)

"Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century," by Jennifer Homans (Random House)

Memoir or Autobiography

"Stay True," by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

Finalists:

"Easy Beauty: A Memoir," by Chloé Cooper Jones (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

"The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir," by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Doubleday)

Poetry

"Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020," by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Finalists:

"Blood Snow," by dg nanouk okpik (Wave Books)

"Still Life," by the late Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s)

General Nonfiction

"His Name is George Floyd," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking)

Finalists:

"Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern," by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books)

"Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction," by David George Haskell (Viking)

"Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation," by Linda Villarosa (Doubleday)

Music

"Omar," by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels

Finalists:

"Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)," by Tyshawn Sorey

In Texas, an immigrant mother of four tries to cope after an 8-year prison sentence for voter fraud.

Original Article from Politics

Hola amigos- today’s longread is one I would call “topical positive.”  That’s certainly better than “topical negative,” a description I would ascribe to most of these articles so far.  Such is the age in which we live, I guess...

As we daily witness various heinous acts and abuses of power, both small scale and large, it’s important to remember the empowering flip side to such decisions.  In the case of Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, which is currently being litigated, there are countless stories of how refugees have been accepted and, in some cases, changed communities.  In today’s piece from Robert Samuels of the Washington Post, we hear the stories of Muslim refugee families who have settled in Nebraska.  We also hear from the people they’ve impacted, including one man who notes that his erstwhile white, American neighbors did drugs and took their country for granted before several Syrian refugees and their kind, industrious families took their place.

Though tomorrow will surely bring more to fret about (and plenty of snow, at least on the East Coast), let’s take some time to remember the good.

Enjoy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-nebraska-syrian-refugees-find-a-warm-and-welcoming-community/2017/02/05/5615c82a-eb9b-11e6-9973-c5efb7ccfb0d_story.html?utm_term=.2d33fa378162

“Trump’s effect on Muslim migrant debate reverberates in heartland”

Yesterday’s article by Robert Samuels of the Washington Post on MSN’s newsfeed elicited several reactions from me. The premise of the article was that Donald Trump’s words caused an arsonist to burn down a Somali owned restaurant in North Dakota. While the premise and conclusion were there, “Trump is to blame”, noticeably lacking was any evidence. When a writer for one of the nation’s 3 premiere…