Latest news with #NobelPrize
Sky News AU
7 hours ago
- Politics
- Sky News AU
DRC President to nominate Trump for Nobel Peace Prize
African reporter Hariana Veras tells US President Donald Trump, the President of Congo wants to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize. 'President Tshisekedi, he's very thankful for what you are doing,' Ms Veras said. 'Finally, they will have hope. 'Tshisekedi also mentioned … when peace finally comes to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he's thinking to nominate you as a Nobel Prize Peace.'
Perth Now
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Ryan Reynolds: None of us are defined by our worst moments
Ryan Reynolds doesn't pay attention to his online critics. The 48-year-old actor and Blake Lively, his wife, are currently involved in a high-profile legal dispute with actor Justin Baldoni, but Ryan insists that he doesn't pay too much attention to the online discourse. Asked whether the online negativity impacts his business ventures, Ryan told Time magazine: "I can read something that says, 'He should be drawn and quartered.' I could read something that says I should win a Nobel Prize. Both are meaningless. "None of us are comprised of our best moments. None of us are defined by our worst moments. We are something in the middle." Ryan has found a healthy way of dealing with the scrutiny during his time in the spotlight. The Hollywood star - who has been married to Blake since 2012 - explained: "Accessibility and accountability are a big part of how I do things. "The people that I work with know me, so there's never a question of anything like that. If you operate with some degree of core values and integrity, they're going to help you up. If you're an a******, they're not. And that's pretty simple." Ryan's attitude has been shaped by "conflict-resolution workshops" that he previously attended. The Deadpool star said: "I skipped rehab in my 20s and decided to go to conflict-resolution workshops in Santa Fe. "Conflict resolution changed my life in a way that I can't quantify. You don't have to agree with the person. You can empathise, you can validate. You can do all those things and get closer to them without having to just blindly agree or win or lose." In 2020, Ryan and his showbiz pal Rob McElhenney became the co-owners of Wrexham AFC, a soccer club based in north Wales. The duo have helped to transform the fortunes of the team, and Rob appreciates Ryan's support and ambition. Rob said: "Ryan's involvement took this from a very small endeavour to a very large endeavour overnight because he has the ability to connect with millions and millions of people. And I don't just mean on social media. I mean spiritually."
Atlantic
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Toni Morrison's Definition of a Legacy
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In 2012, I visited the home of Toni Morrison, who was then 81, to discuss, among other things, her legacy. Morrison's Nobel Prize sat on her kitchen island. She had just published her penultimate novel, Home, and she was quietly but unabashedly engaged in making sure her work would be read as widely as possible. She recalled for me a recent visit to the University of Michigan, where 'my books were taught in classes in law, feminist studies, Black studies. Every place but the English department.' Even as a Nobel laureate, she worried that her work would be confined to courses on identity, shelved in a side room of the American literary pantheon. At the time, I found her efforts difficult to square with her lifelong insistence that she was ' writing for b lack people ' and no one else. Now, almost six years after her death, it makes more sense to me, especially after reading the essay that my colleague Clint Smith wrote about Toni at Random, a new book that tracks Morrison's parallel career as a book editor. First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic 's books section: The real reason men should read fiction ' Fools for Love,' a short story by Helen Schulman The perils of 'design thinking' Americans are tired of choice. The cure for guilty memories In the 1970s, before Morrison was world-famous for her fiction, she worked at Random House, publishing writers who were uncompromising in their vision and advocacy for Black people—but she also had to appeal to a mass audience. This wasn't easy; she was a rare Black editor in a publishing industry that was mostly run by white people for white people. 'A salesman at a conference once told Morrison, 'We can't sell books on both sides of the street,'' Smith writes: 'There was an audience of white readers and, maybe, an audience of Black readers, he meant, but those literary worlds didn't merge.' Yet Morrison didn't believe Black writers had to cater to white audiences. They, too, could create 'something that everybody loves,' she said. Morrison's writers were not middle-of-the-road types: They included Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Gayl Jones, and Muhammad Ali. But she protected their integrity while raising them to the highest standards, putting the same level of rigor into editing them that she brought to her own novels. She interrogated gauzy concepts and clarified ideas. She made their work unimpeachable. And she resisted efforts to make their memoirs more relatable. (After one reader asked for more 'humanness,' she wrote to her boss that that was 'a word white people use when they want to alter an 'uppity' or 'fearless'' Black person.) She believed that a book didn't have to be written for the broadest possible audience to be widely read. In one interview with The Guardian, while explaining her insistence on writing for a Black audience, she noted that Leo Tolstoy hadn't written his classic novels for her, 'a 14-year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio.' Nonetheless, she recognized his brilliance, and white readers could recognize hers. In her way, Morrison was offering a definition of a legacy: That a work reaches beyond not just the writer's lifespan, but her intended audience as well. In both her writing and her editing, Morrison was recording the experiences of Black Americans without looking over her shoulder at white readers or critics. She revealed that there was a market for Black literature on both sides of the street—but she also left an even more important mark. She succeeded, in the long term, not by carefully calibrating the work or by selling the 'humanness' of her characters and her writers, but by putting humanity plainly on the page, where it would outlast her and her critics alike. How Toni Morrison Changed Publishing By Clint Smith At night, she worked on her novels. By day, as an editor at Random House, she championed a new generation of writers. What to Read Sex and the City, by Candace Bushnell Before they became the show of the same name, Bushnell's columns in the pink pages of The New York Observer documented, with light fictionalizations, the sex and social lives of New York's ambitious and powerful—and her own, though she frequently disguised her run-ins as the affairs of her 'friend,' the character Carrie Bradshaw. In this volume of collected Observer columns, most of them focused on Carrie, Bushnell reveals herself to be a sage of power and social capital, an expert on relationships and how they can be used to build careers, accumulate social clout, and stomp on feelings. For anyone with a sense of ambition, whether you're moving somewhere new or settling down where you already are, her work is both an entertaining read and an instruction manual for how even the most casual acquaintanceships can transform your life. Cultivating them intentionally, Bushnell implicitly argues, can turn even the biggest metropolis into a small town where your next opportunity (or at the very least a good party) is just a conversation or two away. — Xochitl Gonzalez Out Next Week 📚 I Want to Burn This Place Down, by Maris Kreizman 📚 Oddbody, by Rose Keating 📚 Angelica: For Love of Country in a Time of Revolution, by Molly Beer Your Weekend Read The Blockbuster That Captured a Growing American Rift By Tyler Austin Harper In a cramped, $50-a-month room above a New Jersey furnace-supply company, Peter Benchley set to work on what he once said, half-jokingly, might be 'a Ulysses for the 1970s.' A novel resulted from these efforts, one Benchley considered titling The Edge of Gloom or Infinite Evil before deciding on the less dramatic but more fitting Jaws. Its plot is exquisite in its simplicity. A shark menaces Amity, a fictional, gentrifying East Coast fishing village. Chaos ensues: People are eaten. Working-class residents battle with an upper-class outsider regarding the best way to kill the shark. The fish eventually dies in an orgy of blood. And the political sympathies of the novel are clear—it sides with the townspeople, and against the arrogant, credentialed expert who tries to solve Amity's shark problem.
Montreal Gazette
19 hours ago
- Health
- Montreal Gazette
The Right Chemistry: There are skeletons in the Nobel Prize closet
Carleton Gajdusek was only five years old in 1928 when he and his entomologist aunt wandered through the woods overturning rocks, looking for insects. Then, they observed in petri dishes how some insects succumbed to insecticides while others were unaffected. That's all it took for Carleton to be bitten by the science bug. As a boy, he read voraciously and was so taken by Paul de Kruif's 1926 Microbe Hunters that he stencilled the names of the scientists in the book on the steps leading to the chemistry lab he had set up in the family's attic. Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Élie Metchnikoff and Paul Ehrlich got steps, but the last step was left blank for himself. Like his heroes, Carleton was going to become a microbe hunter and earn his own step. He did that in 1976, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of a novel type of infectious agent that was causing a terrible ailment among the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea. Known as 'kuru' in the language of the Fore, meaning 'shaking,' the disease starts with tremors and progresses to total incapacitation and then death within months. Gajdusek, who had obtained a medical degree from Harvard and further trained under Nobel laureates Linus Pauling, John Enders and Frank Macfarlane Burnet, believed that kuru was transmitted by a ritualistic practice followed by the Fore. As a form of respect and mourning, family members consumed the brains of deceased relatives. Gajdusek proved that this was the mode of transmission by drilling holes in the skull of chimps and inserting mashed tissue from the brains of kuru victims into their cerebellum, the part of the brain that coordinates voluntary movement. The chimps developed symptoms of kuru. Gajdusek was unable to isolate an infectious agent but theorized that it was 'unconventional virus.' That turned out to be incorrect. In 1997, Stanley Prusiner received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of a novel type of infectious agent, a misfolded protein he called a 'prion' that triggers normal proteins in the brain to fold abnormally. This turned out to be the cause of mad cow disease as well as kuru. The Nobel Prize is the most significant recognition of a scientist's work, but it also shines a spotlight that follows the recipient for the rest of their life. Such scrutiny can sometimes taint the awardee's reputation, as is the case with Gajdusek. Many of his research trips took him to the South Pacific, where he encountered impoverished children who had no opportunity for traditional education. In what seemed to be a benevolent and charitable act, he brought 56 mostly male children back with him to the U.S. and gave them the opportunity to go to high school and college. Events took a dramatic turn in 1996 when one of his adopted children accused him of sexual abuse. This led to an investigation that unveiled incriminating entries in his diary and resulted in a charge of child molestation. Subsequent to a plea bargain, he served about 12 months in jail, after which he left the U.S. and spent the rest of his years in Europe as a visiting scientist in a number of research institutes. Gajdusek is not the only Nobel winner with a blemished reputation. Fritz Haber was awarded the 1918 prize in chemistry for one of the most important discoveries in the annals of science, the synthesis of ammonia. Haber used a catalyst to react nitrogen, a gas that makes up 80 per cent of air, with hydrogen that was available from the reaction of natural gas with steam. The ammonia produced was reacted with nitric acid to form ammonium nitrate, an excellent fertilizer. This triggered the 'green revolution' that greatly decreased world hunger by increasing crop yields. Haber was widely celebrated as the man who 'made bread out of air.' But that was not all Haber made. As a patriotic German, during the First World War he developed a program to produce chlorine gas on a large scale as a chemical weapon. Not only did he develop the program, he supervised the release of the gas at the battle of Ypres in Belgium in 1915 that killed more than a thousand French and Algerian troops, earning him the title 'the father of chemical warfare.' Egas Moniz was a Portuguese neurologist who in 1949 was awarded the Nobel for 'his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses.' Later renamed 'lobotomy,' this surgical procedure severed the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain with the aim of treating such severe mental illnesses as schizophrenia and depression. Before experimenting with lobotomy, Moniz had established a reputation as an inventor by having devised 'cerebral angiography,' a procedure by which sodium iodide is injected into the carotid artery and travels to the brain. Since sodium iodide is opaque to X-rays, blood vessels in the brain can be visualized and tumours and aneurisms located. In 1935, he attended a conference where Yale neuroscientist John Fulton described an experiment in which he had removed the frontal cortex from the brains of chimps; they became docile and lost all aggressiveness. Moniz had been working with patients whose mental disease manifested as violent behaviour, so he thought that what works in chimps can work in humans as well. After performing 19 lobotomies, he reported that symptoms of schizophrenia and depression abated. Inspired by Moniz's results, American neuroscientist Walter Freeman also took up the 'leucotome,' a tool resembling an icepick that could be inserted through the eye socket to severe connections in the frontal lobe. He performed 3,500 lobotomies with an estimated 490 deaths as a direct result. One of his patients was President John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary, who was institutionalized as a result. It soon became clear that even when aggressive behaviour subsided, the side effects of the procedure were intolerable. Patients suffered personality changes, cognitive impairment, infections and seizures. There has been much criticism of Moniz's Nobel Prize because by 1949, it was already apparent that the claims of efficacy were exaggerated and side effects minimized. A number of other Nobel laureates have been criticized for offering disturbing opinions on subjects outside their area of expertise. William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, and James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, both expressed racist views and gave credence to eugenics. Kary Mullis, who received the 1993 Nobel in Chemistry for the invention of the polymerase chain reaction, an invaluable tool for genetic testing, did not think that humans play a role in climate change and was skeptical about AIDS being caused by a virus. He also described a meeting with a fluorescent racoon that he thought could have been an extraterrestrial alien. Nobel laureates may bask in the spotlight, but that spotlight can sometimes illuminate dark corners.
NDTV
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- NDTV
On Pak Nobel Nomination For Trump, Chetan Bhagat's Liquor, Deaddiction Dig
Celebrated author Chetan Bhagat likened Pakistan's Nobel Prize nomination for US President Donald Trump to a liquor shop owner opening a de-addiction clinic. Speaking at NDTV Creators Manchester, Mr Bhagat was asked if he wishes to receiver a Booker Prize for his literary works. "Trump is not getting the Peace Prize, I'm not getting the Booker Prize. He (Trump) has said he should have gotten it four to five times by now. I also feel the same (about getting a Booker Prize)," he said. Pakistan's nomination Trump for the Nobel Prize is what Mr Bhagat said amuses him. "How can Pakistan nominate anyone for the Peace Prize? It is like a liquor shop opening a de-addiction clinic. I have not received any (Booker Prize) nomination yet from (Pakistan Army chief) Asim Munir type people. If it comes, then maybe I will get it," he joked. During the chat, Mr Bhagat also supported Punjabi star Diljit Dosanjh, who is in the middle of a raging controversy about the casting of Pakistani star Hania Aamir in his latest film Sardaar Ji 3. He said, "I love Diljit. he is one of the truly exceptionally talented individuals. I admire him. He sticks to his principles. He wanted to be in Bollywood, but he didn't cut his hair... He still became a star. It's not a joke, anyone can get tempted. His music, his concerts, his reels are hilarious." The 2 States author said that a film does not belong to just an actor, but the hundreds of people that work on it. "Even if you have an issue with Diljit, penalising those people is not fair, so much money has gone into it. Banning a film is too much. You don't like the film, don't watch it. The calls for his boycott are highly unfair," he said. Speaking to NDTV on the sidelines of the event, the author was asked about his opinion on the most overrated book. "I'm thinking... It's mine. If I say someone else's, I'll get beaten up," he quipped.
