An American writer hasn't won the Nobel Prize for Literature since 1993 (Toni Morrison).
Slate's Alexander Nazaryan tells us why: "The rising generation of writers behind Oates, Roth and DeLillo are dominated by Great Male Narcissists — even the writers who aren’t male (or white)."
posted by bardic
on Oct 4, 2011 -
121 comments
In 1973, while working as a young post-doc in Zanvil A. Cohn's laboratory in Rockefeller University,
Ralph Steinman described a completely new immune cell within the lymphoid organs of mice (original paper can be read
here). Based on it's distinctive shape, with it's many branched projections, he named the cell "
dendritic cell" (derived from the Greek word for "tree").
Such began a
prolific and
illustrious career, devoted to the further understanding of these cells, which transformed the way the world understood how the immune system worked. Yesterday,
Dr Steinman was awarded the The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2011 "
for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity". Tragically,
he had died just three days earlier of pancreatic cancer, and never learned that he was to be awarded science’s top honour.
[more inside]
posted by kisch mokusch
on Oct 4, 2011 -
25 comments
Fritz Haber's story is the story of the double edged sword of science. He
won the Nobel prize in 1918 for his groundbreaking work in
breaking the nitrogen cycle for Germany's WWI efforts, but it's been estimated that two out of every five people now living would not have been born if it
weren't for artificial fertilizers created using his process. He also spent much of the war developing poison gases; first chlorine (after watching its first use, Haber's wife committed suicide) and later Zyklon B (the cyanide insecticide later used against his fellow Jews in concentration camps). He died alone and in poverty in Switzerland. But the lessons of his life haven't
quite been forgotten.
posted by Plutor
on Nov 21, 2006 -
17 comments
J.M. Coetzee's Nobel Speech. It seemed to him, coming from his island, where until Friday arrived he lived a silent life, that there was too much speech in the world. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, delivers his lecture from the perspective of Robinson Crusoe.
posted by _sirmissalot_
on Dec 9, 2003 -
8 comments
The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced on Thursday. Two candidates with buzz this year are Syrian poet
Ali Ahmad Said, better known as Adonis, and New Zealand novelist-memoirist
Janet Frame. Other candidates frequently mentioned include JM Coetzee, Philip Roth, Inger Christensen, Tomas Transtroemer, Margaret Atwood and Carlos Fuentes.
posted by Daze
on Sep 30, 2003 -
20 comments
In case you still thought there was still anything even slightly rational, even-handed and non-ideological about the Nobel Peace Prize: Members of the NPP committee that gave Shimon Peres the Prize in 1994 are now attacking him for not singlehandedly putting a stop to Israeli reoccupation of Palestinian territory, even though here's only a member of the cabinet, not the leader of the country. (Alternatively, they say, he should have quit.) Which would be okay, since what's going on now isn't very peaceful ... except that they've said not a peep about about the actions of one of the other two men that shared the prize that year, one Yassir Arafat. (The third, Yitzhak Rabin, apparently gets off the hook since he's already dead.)
posted by aaron
on Apr 5, 2002 -
12 comments
The Nash equilibrium
So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos....from John F. Nash Jr.'s autobiography for the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics.
posted by riley370
on Dec 12, 2001 -
8 comments
Finally the Nobel Prize For Literature Gets It Right Jorge Luis Borges didn't get it. Neither did Marcel Proust. But today V.S.Naipaul, arguably the best writer in the English language since Samuel Beckett died, was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Doesn't this just show it helps not to be English(e.g. Irish, American, Indian or Trinidadian)to be able to write dry and timeless prose such as Sir Vidia's?
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Oct 11, 2001 -
29 comments
Eyes on the Prize White House lobbied Norwegians for Clinton Nobel Peace Prize. Clinton and his minions are despicable, no?
posted by argus
on Oct 13, 2000 -
4 comments
