Pulitzer Prize

Samatha Powers wins the Pulitzer for general non-fiction. I heard her speak at the UCLA Festival of Books. Her book "Problem from Hell" is about the history of genocide and looks are the history of intervention and non-intervention. I saw her interviewed on Newshour on PBS and she was quite pleased with the award and she recounted how she had a hard time even getting a publisher for her book. She hopes the attention garnered will raise the profile of the issue. Her main point is that there is great political risk to stop genocide (things go wrong during intervention) and almost no political credit gained for doing so; thus, non-intervention is the default response. But hopefully as people become more concerned about human rights then there will be some political cost for inaction.