The Washington Post Pulitzers: Gene Weingarten, Feature Writing
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About this ebook
Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.
What happens when one of the world’s most renowned musicians appears incognito outside of a Washington, D.C. metro station to play some of the most beautiful music ever composed?
In the audacious social experiment, “Pearls Before Breakfast”, Gene Weingarten seeks out the answer to this question as he chronicles how an audience of rush hour pedestrians pass indifferently by as international wunderkind Joshua Bell plays his Stradivarius. He also examines a horrifying phenomenon in the remarkable story "Fatal Distraction", in which he speaks to thirteen mothers and fathers whose children died as the result of being left in a sweltering car during the hot summer months.
The result is an emotional revelation that inspires readers to take a closer look at the world around them.
Gene Weingarten
Gene Weingarten is a nationally syndicated humor columnist and a Pulitzer Prize–winning staff writer for The Washington Post. He lives in Washington, DC.
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The Washington Post Pulitzers - Gene Weingarten
The Washington Post Pulitzers
Gene Weingarten
Feature Writing
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2014 by The Washington Post
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com
First Diversion Books edition July 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-373-1
Letter of Introduction—2008
January 7, 2008
To the Judges,
Gene Weingarten’s Pearls Before Breakfast
began as an audacious experiment in social science: What would happen if one of the greatest musicians in the world appeared incognito outside a Washington, D.C. Metro station at rush hour and played some of the most beautiful music ever composed on one of the most valuable violins ever made?
Pearls Before Breakfast
–which appeared in The Washington Post Magazine—chronicles how, for 43 minutes, international virtuoso Joshua Bell played his Stradivarius to an indifferent, unheeding audience. Augmented by captivating real-time video, this became the most viewed article ever to appear on our Web site, washingtonpost.com. The story’s physical reach spanned continents; its emotional reach was incalculable.
More than 40 members of the clergy–priests, ministers and rabbis alike–wrote to say they had crafted a sermon around the message they found in this story: that we must not be so self-absorbed, or in such a pointless hurry, that we miss God’s beauty all around us.
Pearls Before Breakfast
left them in tears. Some didn’t know why. Others put their finger on it eloquently–people sense that they are being spiritually strangled by the tunnel-vision of our culture. Some readers said the story had inspired them to make fundamental changes in their lives, to begin doing what they feel passionate about and not just what pays the bills.
For all these reasons, we believe Pearls Before Breakfast
is groundbreaking piece of journalism. Its enormous power lies in the originality of its conception and the sensitivity and eloquence of its writing.
We are proud to nominate Gene Weingarten for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in Category 8.
Sincerely,
Leonard Downie Jr.
Executive Editor
Pearls Before Breakfast
Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.
Sunday, April 8, 2007
He emerged from the Metro at l’Enfant Plaza Station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.
It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?
On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities—as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.
The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this