He’s the greatest Jewish storyteller of our generation — isn’t it time for him to win the Nobel Prize?
Future Nobel Laureate? Ira Glass, circa 1018. Photo by Getty Images
By Talya Zax October 2, 2023
Think of what a good story sounds like. Yes, sounds. Someone is spinning a yarn, and you are rapt, caught in the threads.
If you are like me, it starts with a friendly voice asking questions, or telling you you’re about to hear something you might not believe. In time, a second voice is added; perhaps a third. They overlap, almost musically. As the narrative builds, your emotions rise and fall along with it.
The art of literature is the art of storytelling. And no one in this modern world has done more to advance that art — to make it more accessible, to draw out its deep humanity, to make it addictive — than Ira Glass, pioneer of narrative radio and podcasts, whose voice you might have conjured just by reading the paragraph above.
And for the ways in which he has remade this oldest of arts, Glass deserves the Nobel Prize for literature.
Laugh if you will; roll your eyes and say, “well, if Bob Dylan won…” But literature began with stories spoken aloud. There is no reason, aside from a senselessly rigid commitment to genre distinctions, to say such stories no longer qualify. Svetlana Alexievich rightly won in 2015 for writing profound oral histories. It’s a tiny stretch to say that Glass should be considered for devoting the same degree of finesse to similar histories, related in a slightly different form.
Plus, the moments when the Nobel Prize has been most intriguing have been those in which the prize givers have thrown off their own impulse to be strict about exactly which kinds of achievement count. Dylan’s infamous 2016 win might have enraged half the people paying attention. But culture is shaped by the things people talk about, and making the world wonder whether lyrics should be considered literature is the most interesting thing the Nobel Committee has done in my lifetime.
That’s not to say the Nobel should be allocated simply for the sake of starting conversation. But it is to say: Unless you are personally receiving the almost $1 million prize — in which case, I’m delighted for you — the Nobel’s main significance is to help the rest of us understand what is meaningful, and to reach for it.
And few, if any, modern storytellers can claim to have had an impact as meaningful as that of Glass. The global listenership for podcasts has skyrocketed, and a recent Pew Center report showed that 43% of Americans 12 and older had listened to a podcast in the past month — a 30% increase in the past decade. This American Life, the radio show-turned-podcast that Glass pioneered and has hosted since 1995, reaches more than 4 million listeners a week. As American adults read fewer books, it is worth asking if the most significant literary form around is that of the narrative podcast — a form that has been made in Glass’ image. “It’s a testament to This American Life’s impact and ubiquity that its chatty style of narration now looms over audio producers everywhere,” New York Magazine’s podcast critic Nicholas Quah wrote in July.
But, crucially, Glass hasn’t just reshaped the cultural landscape. He’s done it really, really well.
I first listened to This American Life in high school, during a summer internship, while seeking relief from the mindless task of entering various numbers into various spreadsheets. The office was dull and painfully cold; the days were long; everything smelled vaguely, tragically of fridge.
But my hours there were thrilling. Every morning, I cued up an episode from the show’s list of its own best efforts, and I kept listening until it was time to go home. With Glass’ voice in my ear, I could be everywhere, and meet anyone. It was immersive in a way few other artistic experiences have, for me, ever rivaled. Once, and I shudder to remember this, I burned a particularly excellent episode onto a CD to give to a boy I was desperately and ineffectively attempting to woo — the modern culture lover’s version of handing over, say, a dog-eared book of love poems.
I am by no means anti-book. But to leave Glass out of the running for the Nobel would be a little like an ancient Nobel committee abandoning consideration of Homer, composer of the Iliad and Odyssey, because he worked within the oral tradition. OK, I exaggerate — but as there is no Nobel Prize in film, or radio, or even visual art, it is only right for the artistic world, in which genres meld with and change each other with thrilling regularity, to demand more expansive representation within its single given category. And if the Nobel Prize wants to be interesting, it must be open to the fact that artistic forms shift and progress over time. In the literary world, writ large, no one has done work more interesting than Glass, or challenged generic norms more effectively.
So: Give the man the Nobel Prize. He’ll give the most captivating lecture any of us have ever heard. He’ll probably do what he’s best at — the thing that’s let him build a platform of such tremendous influence — and find a way, gently but provocatively, warmly but critically, to get us talking.
Or, maybe they should just give it to Martha Nussbaum.
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