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Lukas prizes honor books on homelessness, the US Census and ancient India

By The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Books on homelessness, the U.S. Census and ancient India are among this year’s winners of prizes handed out by the J. Anthony Lukas Project, named for the late author and investigative journalist.

The winners were announced Tuesday by the project’s administrators, the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Jeff Hobbs’ “Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America” won the Lukas Book Prize, a $10,000 honor given for exemplifying “literary grace, commitment to serious research and social concern.” The Mark Lynton Prize for history, a $10,000 award for combining “literary grace, commitment to serious research and social concern,” was given to William Dalrymple’s “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World.”

The Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards, for which each winner receives $25,000, went to danah boyd, for “Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the U.S. Census” and Karim Zidan for “In the Shadow of the Cage.”

The Lukas prizes were established in 1998. Previous winners include Robert Caro,Isabel Wilkerson and Jill Lepore.

Ten years later, the cult of ‘The Nice Guys’ keeps growing

By The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — When “The Nice Guys” debuted 10 years ago, the writing was on the wall for the big-screen comedy. It came out sandwiched between “Captain America: Civil War” and “X-Men: Apocalypse.” It opened against “Angry Birds.” The cartoon birds, Ryan Gosling has lamented, “just destroyed us.” “They’re just so angry,” Gosling once sighed. And yet, marking its upcoming 10th anniversary this month, “The Nice Guys” has established itself as one of the most beloved comedies of the last decade — a decade in which Hollywood studios largely left the genre for dead. A 1970s-set comic noir directed and co-written by Shane Black, “The Nice Guys” paired Gosling and Russell Crowe as private eyes in a Los Angeles crime caper that, a decade later, keeps getting better. “There’s a lot of interest in ‘The Nice Guys’ today that wasn’t there when it opened. And the box office will attest to that,” Black deadpanned in a recent interview. “But people find these things. I think there’s kind of a joy of finding a movie on streaming or rental and then suddenly kind of realizing: How did I miss this? And ‘The Nice Guys’ was easy to miss.”
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