No Vibe Shift Visible in the Pulitzer Prizes

Evan Vucci, who took the news photo of the decade, is denied his Pulitzer.

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, and they still look much like prize lists from the Racial Reckoning. As I’ve been documenting, in the great marble halls of American prestige culture, there’s not much evidence that the fever dreams of June 2020 have yet passed.

Plus, the anti-Trump resistance seems to be re-organizing. For example, obviously the most historic on-the-spot news photo of last year was AP photographer Evan Vucci’s:

But that photo helped get Trump re-elected, so no Pulitzer for Vucci.

The Pulitzer Prize instead went to NYT photographer Doug Mills for taking the second greatest picture on July 13, 2024, showing a bullet whizzing by Trump’s head:

My guess is that Vucci was denied the Pulitzer because his best shot makes Trump look more heroic-looking.

This is not to say anything against Mills. Both veteran photographers risked their lives to get their memorable pictures. Splitting the prize between them would have been fair and fitting. But reasonable compromises like that are not yet back in fashion among the culturally powerful.

The biography category also caught my eye. Five of the last seven winners have been of blacks (six of seven if you give credence to Gore Vidal’s gossip that everybody who was anybody in Washington knew that J. Edgar Hoover was a black man passing as white).

This year, the winner, Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts, dared portray two Dead White European Males, the 18th naturalists Linnaeus and Buffon.

But the book was recognized because of its efforts to have Linnaeus cancelled for not believing in today’s Race Does Not Exist conventional wisdom. From the New York Times’ review:

Paywall here. Post-paywall I recount Buffon’s theory of American Degeneracy and Thomas Jefferson’s Stuffed Moose Rebuttal.