Nobel Prize

Christoph Irmscher on the strange, lifelong discomfort of the author of ‘Siddhartha’ and ‘Steppenwolf.’

The Swedish Academy took the year off. Robert Messenger explains why we should be glad.

Far be it from me to say whether Donald Trump’s diplomacy on the Korean peninsula entitles him to join Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama among our recent Nobel Peace Prize laureates. But Condoleezza Rice is surely correct to suggest that the Trump administration—including ex-secretary of…

Indeed he did.

Muhammad Yunus, the father of microcredit, thinks he knows how to fix capitalism, end poverty, and even get rid of carbon emissions. Here's what he’s missing.

In 2003, when J. M. Coetzee was announced the recipient of that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the news wasn’t met with outraged cries of “Who?” or “Why?” With nine brilliant novels under his belt, along with a haul of prestigious literary awards—including a hitherto unprecedented two Booker…

The Scrapbook has been impressed, during the past several months, by some things President Trump has not done.

For the vast edifice of baloney that is social psychology, there’s been good news and bad news lately. The good news is that Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize. Thaler is the foremost evangelist for behavioral economics—the parasitic discipline that uses the findings of social psychology to…

We call it the Nobel prize in economics, but the Nobel that Richard Thaler won last week is technically a prize in “economic sciences,” and that bit of self-puffery (Oh, we’re scientists now, are we?) is fitting. Thaler is a pioneer of behavioral economics, the latest craze to sweep a trade not…

We call it the Nobel prize in economics, but the Nobel that Richard Thaler won last week is technically a prize in “economic sciences,” and that bit of self-puffery (Oh, we’re scientists now, are we?) is fitting. Thaler is a pioneer of behavioral economics, the latest craze to sweep a trade not…

Andrew Ferguson talks with host Eric Felten about the problems with Richard Thaler's Nobel-winning Behavioral Economics.

The news that Bob Dylan cribbed parts of his Nobel speech from SparkNotes, of all places, serves one excellent purpose: It has quieted down the high-brow Dylan fans who were competing to see who could overpraise the lecture most. (Don't worry, they'll be back.) The first cheerleader was the Nobel…

Speaking of media credibility, The Scrapbook itself has screwed up, for which we are very sorry. But we are grateful to Theresa M. Towner, professor of literary studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, for her gracious letter of reproval. She noted that “Knock, Knock, Knocking," an item in our…

There are many admiring things to say about Bob Dylan. While he may not be the hardest-working man in show business—the title once held by the martyred James Brown—he's still pretty close, recording and touring continuously at the age of 75. He's probably written more publishable songs, music and…

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan is not only merited. It is inspiring, thrilling, reassuring. It restores a bit of faith in the prize itself. In recent decades the Nobel committee had taken to honoring fashionable charlatans or, at best, writers of limited scope and only…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior editor Andrew Ferguson on his story "Bob Dylan, Nobelist".

Bob Dylan's Nobel prize is a culturally revealing moment, not only about the miserable state of modern literature but the even-more-miserable state of modern music criticism. Let's get this straight: Dylan can't sing and can't play. The musicians who did most to disguise these facts, the Band, were…

There are many admiring things to say about Bob Dylan. While he may not be the hardest-working man in show business—the title once held by the martyred James Brown—he's still pretty close, recording and touring continuously at the age of 75. He's probably written more publishable songs, music and…

The Nobel Prize committee awarded Bob Dylan with the prize for literature Thursday, which will no doubt prove to be a controversial selection. The issue is not that Dylan is yet another obscure figure the committee named apparently to score political points, nor that he writes in a language little…

The Nobel Peace Prize committee has given this year's award to the European Union. The committee explains in a press release:

The Nobel Peace Prize is the world’s most prestigious award, as Jay Nordlinger argues in this erudite and insightful history. He has written not only the go-to reference book for the prize and its laureates but also an important philosophical reflection on the nature of “peace” in modern times.

Department of Energy loan program director resigns.

Ladbrokes of London, the famous British bookmaker, lists the Syrian-born poet Adonis as a 4 to 1 favorite to win this year’s Nobel Prize, due to be announced in the next few days.  According to one Ladbrokes official, “I really think this is poetry’s year, and without a doubt, the politically…

The nomination of a scoundrel like Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize is not without precedent – in fact, there’s a good chance he could win it. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, would join the company of Palestinian terrorist-in-chief Yasser Arafat if he were to be awarded the prize.

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese intellectual serving an 11-year jail sentence on subversion charges, has accomplished two great things.

Eighteen countries, including China, chose not to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honoring jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiabo last week in Oslo. Along with the Palestinians, those countries include: Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia,…

Tomorrow, the Nobel Peace Prize committee will give its award to jailed Chinese human rights advocate Liu Xiabo. How is China responding? In short, not well.

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo on October 8 is a huge problem for China’s leaders. It undermines their efforts to portray the Chinese Communist party as the legitimate representative of China’s people. And for that very reason, Liu’s prize is an enormous boon to the people of…

When Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize last week, the authoritarians in Beijing responded in their typical, iron-fisted fashion. The Foreign Ministry immediately called the award "blasphemy" and a "desecration," and characterized Liu as a common criminal. They cancelled…

An EU diplomat and diplomats from 10 European countries tried to deliver a letter of congratualtions from EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso to Liu Xia, the wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo at her home in Beijing. They were prevented from entering by guards.  Liu Xia is under…

Ellen Bork's roundup of Nobel Peace Prize reactions yesterday deserves a postscript. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela sucked up to his ideological comrades in Beijing (not to mention very large customers of Venezuelan oil) in memorable fashion:

Here are a few reactions to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize on October 8 to the writer and literary critic Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced in December 2009 to an 11-year sentence for “incitement to subversion of state power” for his writings about democracy and human rights and his association…

When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s most prominent dissidents, now serving an 11-year jail sentence, I could not help but think of a small, inspiring museum in Oslo called the Museum of Resistance. It tells the story of Norway’s courageous citizens who refused…

An announcement of the Nobel Prize for literature is almost necessarily accompanied by columns listing those distinguished writers who were passed over, as well as more than a few clunkers who were not. As for the roster of the omitted, since the Russians Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) and Leo Tolstoy…

This morning the Swedish academy awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature to Mario Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” With benefactors like the ones who authored this overwrought passage, who…

Tomorrow the Swedish Academy will announce the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and various sportsbooks, like Ladbroke’s, are laying odds. But since the Swedish academy’s methods for selecting the prize-winner are a mystery to all but its members, those odds reflect almost exclusively the…

Algis Valiunas on the works of the Nobel laureate.