Rest in peace Aleksandr Isayevich

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the great men of the 20th Century, indeed a prophet of Biblical proportions, has passed into history.

His address to the Harvard graduates 30 years ago, are the words we in the west need to hear today.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

J. K. Rowling and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Here is a fascinating list which compares the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature with who should have won in an alternate universe.

Some I strongly disagree with. For example, I think Sigrid Undset deserved the prize in 1928 and that she is too overlooked. Still some of the other alternatives are proper - in hindsight. (No prizes for Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and Henry James?)

Still others, if not proper for that year are clearly contenders (W. H. Auden, George Orwell).

Some are wacky (1974 - John Lennon, Paul McCartney).

Others are a fun matchup - who won in 1930? F. Scott Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis?

My own favorite suggestions: Chesterton, Bob Dylan, Dr. Seuss, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Phillip K. Dick, J.R.R. Tolkein, Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler (but no room for Edgar Rice Burroughs).

Read and enjoy.