Looking over the list of journalism winners, I see that the Gene Weingarten’s Washington Post story Pearls Before Breakfast won an award for feature writing. This fantastic piece details an experiment arranged by the paper during the morning rush hour at L’Enfant Plaza last January:
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?
