Bob Dylan took home rock ‘n’ roll’s first Pulitzer Prize thanks to a special award presented to the iconic songwriter for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” Dylan, humbled by the announcement, said he was in “disbelief.”

Another Pulitzer first occurred when two awards were handed out for poetry. Philip Schultz’s Failure and Robert Hass’ Time and Materials both received honors for distinguished volumes of original verse by an American author. You can read the title poem from Schultz’s collection, as well as hear the poet read it here.

The Washington Post emerged with six Pulitzers, including “Jo Becker and Barton Gellman, who won the national reporting award for documenting the power and secrecy wielded by Vice President Dick Cheney, and to Steve Fainaru, who won the international reporting prize for his examination of private security contractors in Iraq.”

A full list of winners can be found here and here.

Researchers are trying to prove that ecstasy can be used for more than dancing to mind-numbingly awful techno.This Washington Post article on Research into the medical use of MDMA, aka ecstasy, is pretty interesting. It talks about treatments in post-traumatic stress disorder, double-blind studies, and includes the views of important figures on both sides of the debate over medical use of ecstasy.

It also introduced me to my hero of the day, Alexander Shulgin (formerly of Dow Chemical).

“I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit,” he wrote. “We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.”

Shulgin made it his business to find those chemicals. In a New York Times profile in 2005, when Shulgin was 79, he estimated that he’d synthesized 200 psychoactive compounds and tested them on himself. Their effects ranged from paralyzing him with fear to granting him ecstatic visions. With MDMA, he was convinced that he’d found something special.

“I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria,” he wrote in his field journal. “The cleanliness, clarity, and marvelous feeling of solid inner strength continued . . . through the next day. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience.”

Sadly, the possibility of future medical use will forever be tarnished by this guy: