Một tác giả gốc Việt đã được giải thưởng cao quý của Mỹ, Pulitzer, trong hạng mục tiểu thuyết.
'Cảm tình viên' (The sympathizer), mở đầu ở năm 1975 ở Sài Gòn và kể về một cảm tình viên cộng sản trốn thoát sang Los Angeles. Anh ta đột nhập và theo dõi một nhóm người miền Nam Việt Nam.

Hôm thứ Hai 18/4 tác phẩm này của Nguyễn Thanh Việt đã được trao giải Pulitzer 2016, thể loại tiểu thuyết hư cấu, là giải thưởng văn chương cao quí nhất ở Hoa Kỳ.
Trên chính trường Mỹ, cuộc chiến Việt Nam đã lùi vào dĩ vãng. Nhưng trên diễn đàn văn chương, ở một góc độ náo đó thì tâm thức nước Mỹ vẫn chưa bao giờ quên. Chiến tranh chấm dứt đã 41 năm, nay với giải Pulitzer 2016, cuộc chiến Việt Nam đã được gợi lại, nhưng qua một góc nhìn mới lạ của Nguyễn Thanh Việt, từ một đứa trẻ tị nạn, tốt nghiệp tiến sĩ văn chương từ Đại học Berkeley và đang giảng dạy tại University of Southern California.

NV: Ông có lời nào với các bạn trẻ gốc Việt muốn theo đuổi con đường viết văn chuyên nghiệp?
Giáo Sư Nguyễn Thanh Việt: Tôi muốn nhắn nhủ rằng dù bạn trẻ hay già thì văn chương là một phần của lịch sử, di sản và văn hóa của chúng ta. Có một sự thật đáng buồn rằng niềm đam mê hay tìm tòi về văn chương đang dần dần bị thay thế bằng các thứ khác. Đối với các bạn muốn theo đuổi nghệ thuật văn chương, tôi khuyến khích họ lắng nghe trái tim mình và tin tưởng vào câu chuyện mà mình sáng tác.

"Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen has made a major contribution not only to the history of the Vietnam War but also to the history of wars and their aftermath. South Vietnamese Soldiers is both a scholarly and an emotive account of those who served in the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam. Based on extensive interviews with former service personnel, the book recovers an important dimension of the war, too often distorted or completely overlooked in the extensive literature on the war." (Peter Edwards, Official Historian of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975)

Powerful and damning accounts of the Bush administration’s determination to work what Vice President Dick Cheney called “the dark side” and its elaborate efforts to legalize torture (including arduous attempts to narrowly define torture as leading to “serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage” is likely to result) can be found in two essential books, “The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib,” edited by Karen J. Greenbergand Joshua L. Dratel, and “Standard Operating Procedure,” by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris. An important personal perspective is now provided by Eric Fair’s candid and chilling new book, “Consequence,” which is at once an agonized confession of his own complicity as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib and an indictment of the system that enabled and tried to justify torture.

Film Synopsis
An abandoned pharmaceutical factory becomes the backdrop for an artistic movement taking place in Hanoi, Vietnam. Artists and entrepreneurs of all ages and backgrounds come together to form an arts complex known as "Zone 9" in an attempt to fulfill their dreams and passions.
Zone 9 follows local artists and entrepreneurs Phuong Vu Manh, Tran Vu Hai, Nguyen Qui Duc and Tham Cam Phuong through the formation, development and ultimate destruction of Zone 9.

About filmmakers
Nguyễn Anh Thư has a strong desire to make documentaries conveying social issues and problems people have to face in her home country. To her, documentary is a powerful media to tell stories, to contribute to social change and to express herself. Her first film “When we were 20” won the first prize for documentary in 2009 by the “We are filmmakers” project and was screened at several universities in United States, including Yale, NYU and Princeton. Nguyen Anh Thư’s second short is about the influence of urbanization on a small village in Hanoi while her third film, which is now under post-production, explores a reforestation and conservation project in the Atlantic rain forest of Brazil.
Gabriel Hernandez is a Hanoi expat and native New Yorker with a strong appreciation of documentary film, art and travel. To him Zone 9 was an important part of the development of the local arts scene in Vietnam and thus aims to showcase its contributions with this documentary.

With a shoestring budget of about 500,000 Hong Kong dollars, or about $64,000, and a limited theater release, the film has raked in more than 5 million Hong Kong dollars, finding resonance with present-day fears that local culture and liberties are being threatened under Chinese rule. “We just hope that our feelings are shared by the Hong Kong people,” said Ng Ka-leung, a producer and director of the film, after he won the award. “We want to use our work to ponder the future of Hong Kong.”

A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. (Listen to it here.) It completes his vision of a universe in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle. And it is a ringing confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.

Most science teachers in the United States spend some time on climate change in their courses, but their insufficient grasp of the science as well as political factors “may hinder effective teaching,” according to a nationwide survey of the profession.

According to a new report that looked at a survey of 70,000 community-college students, 40 percent of students who said they averaged an A in high school reported that they needed a developmental course in at least one subject. Students with A- or B+ averages said they needed a brush-up course more than 50 percent of the time, and those with B averages required such a course nearly 60 percent of the time. Combined, these three levels of achievement accounted for 57 percent of the community-college students who were asked this question in the survey.