By Christopher Brennan 10/15/12 1:24pm

it's a match!

Alvin Roth

Nobel Committee Wants Everyone to Get Along

A pair of American scholars who dedicated their careers to bringing people together were rewarded with a Nobel prize for economics, the Nobel committee said this morning. Alvin Roth, who teaches at Harvard and Stanford, and Lloyd Shapley, a professor emeritus at UCLA, were notified this morning that they had won the prize.

Mr. Roth and Mr. Shapley worked independently on cooperative game theory, tackling such subjects as why a price mechanism that helps match buyers and sellers for scarce resources such as diamonds doesn’t serve areas such as organ transplants, school admissions or dating services. In the 1960s Mr. Shapley, now 89, pioneered a process for creating “stable matches” by creating a speed-dating system in which the two sexes took turns selecting potential partners. Read More

By Emily Witt 10/10/11 3:34pm

Publishing

Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer (C), win

After Nobel Prize, the Race to Publish More Tomas Tranströmer

When Barbara Epler received the news last week that Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer had won the Nobel Prize for literature, she had one reaction: “I said, ‘Call the printers!’” she recalled.

Ms. Epler is the president of New Directions, publisher of Mr. Tranströmer’s The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, an anthology translated by the Scottish poet Robin Fulton. For New Directions, Mr. Tranströmer’s win was big news — by Friday its book was ranked #12 on Amazon, a rarity for the independent publisher, which is known for its commitment to publishing difficult poetry and literature in translation. Read More

By Mike Taylor 10/08/10 12:47pm

Morning Roundup: Bank Breakup Rules Coming Soon

  • Breaking up is hard to do, especially when the separation involves components of systemically important financial institutions. The FDIC is expected to offer a helping hand today by outlining new rules that would change the haircut taken by creditors to giant firms in the event of a failure. [WSJ]
  • ’80s retro fever is Read More

By Nate Freeman 10/07/10 10:43pm

literatureThe Nobel Prize

Mario Vargas Llosa, Today’s Nobel Lit Winner, Can Now Be Taken Seriously By Jordanian Border Patrols

The Swedish Academy announced this morning that Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa will be the 2010 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In a statement on its website, the academy said they decided to award Llosa for his “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”  Read More