It came up this week with this map on poverty and deprivation in London, part of our London: the data series. Recently we've been using the colour scale on the map below, which is a variation on the famous traffic light collection of colours - for the Guardian, this tends to go from green, meaning good, or low - up to red, meaning bad or high. It's used by map makers and newspaper designers all the time. But is it any good?
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Columbia University has named its 2012 Pulitzer Prize winners. Huffington Post and Politico each won their first Pulitzers, for national reporting and editorial cartooning, respectively. The New York Times won two awards, and the Philadelphia Inquirer won for Public Service after a difficult year. The Associated Press won for an investigation into NYPD practices. Below is a list of the winners and finalists with links to their honored work and their own coverage of their victories.
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What is the author's debt to society and how does he repay it?
Today, I'm headed to Columbia to take part in a symposium on the future of journalism—a subject that feels at once on some great cusp and under the weight of a myriad conflicting pressures. It prompted me to revisit one of my all-time favorite Paris Review interviews, a 1969 conversation, in which the great George Plimpton and sidekick Frank H. Crowther interview E. B. White. White has previously voiced strong opinions on the free press and, of course, the architecture of language, but here he shares some timeless yet strikingly timely insights on the role and the responsibility of the writer:
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
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