Listen and Subscribe
Podcast Transcript
In his will, Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, left most of his fortune to establish a prize honoring achievements in various fields.
Except during the World Wars, the Nobel Prizes have been given out every year, and 2026 continues this tradition.
This year, the Nobel Committee awarded 10 men and women for their contributions to peace, literature, physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics.
Learn more about the 2026 Nobel Prize recipients and the work that they were recognized for on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
It is October, which means the Nobel Prizes are announced, and once again I’ll go over each new Nobel Laureate and why the Nobel Committee honored them.
If you’ve been listening a while, you know the Nobel Prize is far from perfect. There have been prizes given out for research that has proven to be outright wrong. There have been major snubs of people who should have received a Nobel Prize but didn’t.
Almost every year, most people have no clue who the recipients are, which is to be expected. Every year, there’s also controversy over who received the award and why.
So, with that, let’s turn our attention to what I think is the weakest award, the Nobel Prize in Literature.
I call it the weakest award because it feels out of place compared to the others, and it is so subjective. Moreover, the award has to consider literature from countries and languages around the world, and I’m not sure any committee can do that accurately.
What ends up happening is that they spread the award around to writers from different countries, most of whom are older and have careers known only to that country’s literati.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient is Canadian Anne Carson. According to the Nobel committee, she received the award “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
Her most notable works include
Autobiography of Red, published in 1998. It is a novel written in poetic verse that reimagines the Greek myth of Geryon, a red-winged monster killed by Heracles, as a modern story about growing up, sexuality, and unrequited love. It reportedly sold at least 25,000 copies by 2000, an unusually strong number for contemporary poetry.
The Beauty of the Husband was published in 2001. It is an experimental narrative about marriage, betrayal, and desire, organized as a series of poetic movements.
Nox, published in 2010, is an unusual book-length elegy for her brother, presented as an accordion-fold collection of fragments, photographs, translations, and personal recollections.
She didn’t have the sort of commercial success of a Steven King, but she was successful within her niche.
The funniest thing in the aftermath of her announcement is that Princeton sent out a congratulatory tweet, as she taught there in the 1980s… and they denied her tenure.
Reports are that her book sales have exploded since the announcement, which is to be expected.
The winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize for Peace is Navanethem “Navi” Pillay from South Africa.
According to the Nobel Committee, she was honored for “Her efforts to promote peace and international law, particularly through her lifelong commitment to human rights and accountability for serious international crimes.”
A South African of Indian descent, Navi Pillay was born in Durban during the apartheid era.
She became a lawyer and challenged the apartheid system, representing political prisoners and advocating for people subjected to racial discrimination.
She also worked on legal matters involving prisoners such as Nelson Mandela. After apartheid ended, Pillay became an influential figure in international law.
She served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which prosecuted individuals responsible for crimes committed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
She later served as a judge at the International Criminal Court, which investigates and prosecutes individuals accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression within its jurisdiction.
Between 2008 and 2014, she served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
As I’ve noted in previous episodes, the Peace Prize tends to go to one of three types: someone who negotiated a peace treaty or ended a war, someone who resisted a totalitarian government, or someone in the general do-gooder category.
Last year’s award went into the second category, and this year’s goes into the third.
The winners of the 2026 Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel are Americans Robert Hall of Stanford University, and Michael Woodford of Columbia University.
According to the Nobel Committee they were given the prize “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.”
For much of the twentieth century, macroeconomists studied broad economic quantities such as GDP, unemployment, and inflation.
Hall and Woodford helped advance approaches that explain those aggregate outcomes by examining how individual people and businesses respond to incentives and expectations.
Robert Hall, made important contributions to understanding consumer spending, unemployment, and economic fluctuations. One of his influential ideas concerns how people decide when to spend money.
Traditional economic thinking often assumed that when someone’s income increases, their spending will increase as well.
Under certain assumptions, Hall’s research showed that people should find it difficult to predict changes in consumer spending using information they already have.
This became known as the random walk hypothesis of consumption.
One of Michael Woodford’s key research areas concerns expectations.
Consider a business that must decide whether to raise its prices.
Its decision may depend not only on present costs, but also on what it expects will happen to inflation, interest rates, and customer demand over the coming months. Likewise, consumers deciding whether to buy a house may care as much about expected future interest rates as current borrowing costs.
Woodford helped explain how these expectations influence the economy.
He also investigated sticky prices, meaning prices that do not adjust immediately when economic conditions change.
Together, Hall and Woodford helped build a more detailed understanding of how individual economic decisions and expectations drive economy-wide fluctuations, giving policymakers better tools to study inflation, recessions, and monetary policy.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three men. Karl Deisseroth of Stanford, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin, and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg, Germany.
The Nobel Committee recognized them “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”
For centuries, scientists have struggled with a fundamental problem in neuroscience: how can you determine exactly what individual cells in the brain do?
The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons. These cells communicate using electrical signals. If scientists stimulate one part of the brain, they may activate millions of cells simultaneously, making it difficult to determine which specific neurons control a particular action or behavior.
The solution came from an unexpected source: green algae.
Certain single-celled algae can detect sunlight and swim toward it. Researchers discovered that these organisms contain special proteins called channelrhodopsins.
These proteins act like microscopic doors in a cell membrane. When light strikes them, they open and allow electrically charged particles, called ions, to pass through.
Because moving ions creates electrical changes, these proteins can act as light-controlled switches.
Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel helped discover and characterize these light-sensitive proteins, demonstrating how they could control electrical activity.
Karl Deisseroth and his collaborators subsequently developed techniques for inserting genes that produce these proteins into mammalian neurons.
The result was revolutionary. Scientists could shine light on selected neurons and cause them to become active, with extraordinary precision.
This technique has allowed researchers to investigate how memories are formed, how the brain controls movement, and how different neural circuits influence behavior.
It has also opened new possibilities for studying Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and psychiatric disorders.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Henri B. Kagan Université Paris-Sud in France, Kenso Soai of the Tokyo University of Science.
The committee recogonized them “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.”
One of the strangest facts about chemistry is that some molecules can exist in two forms that have exactly the same atoms and chemical bonds, but are mirror images of each other.
The easiest way to understand this is to look at your hands. Your left and right hands have the same basic structure, but no matter how you rotate them, you cannot make them perfectly overlap.
Certain molecules behave the same way. Chemists call this property chirality, from the Greek word for hand.
Although two mirror-image molecules may look almost identical, they can behave very differently when interacting with the human body. This is because biological systems are themselves highly dependent on molecular handedness.
Kagan was an important pioneer in asymmetric catalysis. Kagan investigated how specially designed catalysts could encourage a chemical reaction to produce more of one mirror-image molecule than the other.
He also helped demonstrate and analyze nonlinear effects in asymmetric catalysis.
Ordinarily, one might expect that a small imbalance in the handedness of a catalyst would create a similarly small imbalance in the product. But in certain reactions, the relationship is not proportional.
A catalyst mixture containing only a modest excess of one handed form can sometimes produce a much larger excess of that form in the final product. This demonstrated that relatively small molecular differences could be amplified through chemical reactions.
Kenso Soai made a closely related discovery involving asymmetric autocatalysis. Autocatalysis occurs when a substance produced by a chemical reaction helps accelerate the same reaction.
Soai discovered reactions in which the product not only helps produce more of itself, but also favors the production of molecules with the same handedness.
This can create a remarkable chain reaction.
Suppose a reaction initially produces 51% right-handed molecules and 49% left-handed molecules. Under suitable conditions, autocatalysis can amplify that tiny imbalance until the mixture consists almost entirely of right-handed molecules.
Our last award is the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics. The recipient is Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin.
The committee recognized him “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.”
Before I explain why Francis Halzen was awarded the Nobel Prize, I should note how rare it is for a person to win the Nobel Prize in physics alone. This is the first time this has happened since 1992.
Everything we know about the universe has historically come largely from observing electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, radio waves, and X-rays.
But we can study the cosmos in other ways.
One involves particles called neutrinos.
Neutrinos are incredibly small particles with almost no mass and no electrical charge. Nuclear reactions, including those inside the Sun, and some of the universe’s most energetic events produce them.
Trillions of neutrinos pass through your body every second without you noticing. They interact so rarely with other matter that most pass through the entire Earth without hitting anything.
This makes neutrinos extremely difficult to detect.
However, it also makes them valuable to astronomers. Unlike light, neutrinos can escape from dense environments and travel vast distances without being absorbed or significantly deflected.
Francis Halzen helped lead the effort to build an enormous detector capable of discovering neutrinos arriving from deep space.
The result was the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
IceCube consists of thousands of extremely sensitive light detectors suspended on long cables in Antarctic ice, reaching depths of roughly 2.5 kilometers.
The surrounding ice acts as an enormous natural detector.
Although most neutrinos pass through the ice without interacting, occasionally one strikes an atomic particle. This collision can produce a fast-moving, charged particle that generates a faint blue flash of light, known as Cherenkov radiation.
In 2013, IceCube researchers announced the first compelling evidence of extremely energetic neutrinos originating beyond our solar system.
In 2018, researchers linked a high-energy neutrino detected by IceCube to a distant blazar, a galaxy containing an actively feeding supermassive black hole whose jet points toward Earth.
By creating the IceCube observatory, researchers opened up a whole new method of astronomy.
Predicting who will win a Nobel Prize is very difficult, so the only way to know who will win next year’s prizes is to pay attention next year in October.