I went to bed Wednesday night, October 5, believing that there was a reasonable chance that, when I awoke, Philip Roth would at last have won a Nobel Prize in Literature. This was a mistake. The first problem was the scheduling. The Prizes are usually announced over the course of a single week, one announcement per day, and in the 'natural' course of events, the Lit Prize would have been announced after each of the 'hard sciences' on the list" medicine, physics, chemistry, had had its turn in the spotlight. So, that would have been last Thursday. Unbeknowst to me, though, the Lit panel had announced back in September, before I was paying attention, that it was taking longer than usual to make its decision, and that it would not bestow its prize this year until the Thursday after everybody else had bestowed the others. Maybe they're tired of always coming in the middle, after the hard sciences, before the Huge Publicity events of Peace and Economics. M...
