The New Yorker Wins the Pulitzer for Scaring the Shit Out of Oregonians

Oh look. Your deepest fear won a Pulitzer!

It's the first year ever that magazines were allowed to enter the Pulitzers, and it looks like The New Yorker is feeling pretty good about itself.

First, Greatest Television Writer of All Time* [*as decided by this writer], Emily Nussbaum, won in the category of Criticism. Nussbaum's writing about television is brilliant and almost always absolutely right. Almost. See: the time she didn't like Season One of True Detective.

The second win for the magazine that you feel guilty you haven't read all the way through once this year was for their story, "The Really Big One."

You know the story. It's the one your mom forwarded to you, the precursor to the conversation about earthquake safety kits, the catalyst that finally got you to buy an extra gallon of water, which is now collecting dust in your closet. It's the tale of what's going to happen to us when the Cascadia subduction zone finally goes berserk.

We wrote a similar piece, back in 2010 when earthquakes were less en vogue. That deep sense of fear that sticks with you at all times that you can't quite place? It probably started back then.

Recently, Vice came out with "an immersive, reported science fiction saga about surviving the coming mega-quake." Read it to your children as a companion piece to The New Yorker piece, as a bedtime story. They might as well be ready for a time when Pulitzers will no longer matter and the one jug of water in your closet will be a sad joke, told around a campfire, while you gnaw on human bones of the weak.

Happy Monday!

Willamette Week

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