Add Presidential Medal of Freedom to the long list of awards that Bob Dylan has won. The Minnesota troubadour is among this year's 13 recipients of the highest award for a civilian, the White House announced Thursday. Dylan is performing in Argentina and did not release a comment. The award will be presented later in the spring. It's too early to tell if Dylan, who turns 71 next month, will show up. He did not receive his Pulitzer Prize citation in person in 2008 because he was on tour. Among his other awards are the National Medal of Arts, 11 Grammys, one Oscar, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and membership in France's Ordre des Art et des Lettres. The Presidential Medal of Freedom announcement hailed Dylan as "one of the most influential American musicians of the 20th century."Dylan, who was born in Duluth and raised in Hibbing, is the first Minnesota-born recipient since former Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1988. Also to be honored this year are former astronaut John Glenn, Israeli President Shimon Peres, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, author Toni Morrison, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, John Doar, a lawyer who played key roles in the civil rights era and Watergate investigation, epidemiologist William Foege, farm-worker organizer Dolores Huerta, and Pat Summitt, the former University of Tennessee women's basketball coach. Posthumous honorees include Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low; Jan Karski, who gave eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust; and Gordon Hirabayashi, who protested Japanese-American internment during World War II.
JON BREAM
Bloomberg starts new literary honorThe literary world still has not recovered from its Pulitzer snub last week. But they may find some consolation for the absence of a fiction award in a new set of prizes that Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Thursday: the NYC Literary Honors, given to living writers whose work and lives have been informed by New York City. The honorees included Paul Auster for fiction, Roz Chast for humor, Walter Dean Myers for children's literature and Robert A. Caro for nonfiction. Marie Ponsot was honored for poetry; Robert Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, received an award for contributions to literary life; and Angelica Modabber was a student honoree.
DAMAGES: A woman who failed to sway jurors with her claim that a "Girls Gone Wild" video exploited her has won $5.77 million in a retrial before a judge. Tamara Favazza was a 20-year-old college student in 2004 when someone lifted her tank top while a video crew was recording at a St. Louis club. She sued for damages, claiming she did not consent to use of her image in the "Girls Gone Wild Sorority Orgy" DVD series.
