THE WASHINGTON POST: Kathryn Schulz won the Pulitzer Prize for her New Yorker article that described the pending Cascadia subduction zone quake in the Pacific Northwest.
The Erik Wemple Blog would like to make particular mention of the winner in the feature writing category. “The Really Big One,” in the July 20, 2015, issue of the New Yorker, had a lot going against it. It was about fault lines; it was written under the tagline “Annals of Seismology”; it concerned an event that hadn’t yet happened; it contained a lot of highly technical material. It had all the makings of a forgettable piece of journalism.
Someone forgot to tell Kathryn Schulz. Under her fingertips, the story was a riveting trot through the underpinnings of the Pacific Northwest — which just so happen to be very dicey, though this blog didn’t know a thing about it at all. Ignorance about this dynamic is one of its features, as Schulz wrote in the piece: “Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.”
