— American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan will not go to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize for Literature in person. The Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, said in a statement issued Wednesday that it had received a personal letter from Dylan “in which he explained that due to pre-existing commitments, he is unable to travel…
— American singer and songwriter Bob Dylan has not been in contact with the Swedish Academy since it awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature last week. Dylan also has not made a public statement about the honor, the New York Times reported Tuesday. Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told Swedish public…
Now that Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, we find this to be an appropriate time to consider the best and worst aspects of this amazing honor. THE BEST THINGS 1) It expands the definition of what constitutes great literature. 2) It vindicates all of us who suffered through the albums…
In Cambridge, Massachusetts—home to prestigious schools like Harvard and M.I.T.—the Swedish Academy’s announcement of Nobel Prize winners usually brings happy news to several professors. The streak holds this month, as Harvard economist Oliver Hart scored a Nobel for his works on contracts. Sharing the Prize in Economics with his MIT colleague, Bengt Holmstrom, the Jewish…
British-born Oliver Hart and Finland’s Bengt Holmstrom won the Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for work that addresses a host of questions from how best to reward executives to whether schools and prisons should be privately owned. Their findings on contract theory have implications for corporate governance, bankruptcy legislation and political constitutions, among other fields,…
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his efforts to end a 52-year-old war with Marxist rebels, a surpise choice after Colombians voted against the accord in a referendum. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said Santos had brought one of the longest civil wars in modern history significantly closer…
Now that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner has been announced, let’s pause to remember the courageous, improbable and tragic story of Carl von Ossietzky, the 1936 laureate, a journalist and activist who exposed the Nazis’ clandestine rearmament of Germany and paid a terrible price for his defiance. Some years, the process of awarding the…
How does a bagel explain the physics theory that helped a British Jewish professor win a share of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics? More than you might think. Michael Kosterlitz, who is Jewish, shared the prestigious prize with colleagues David Thouless and Duncan Haldane for revealing unusual states of matter, leading to advances in…
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