In Stockholm, I seem to have stepped through the looking glass into a sensible world where journalists have better things to write about than “Is blogging journalism?” For example, a bunch of new Nobel laureates with good things to say about more interesting questions.
I’ll say this for real journalists–how many bloggers would jump out of bed early enough to interview my husband at 7:15 a.m.? Well, some nice young man from Swedish radio did.
Later, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences fed the science laureates breakfast in their tower, interrupted by a rare astronomical event–an occultation of Jupiter. (Alas, the sky was too bright for us to see it, though we could all see the slender crescent moon.)
Another press conference and a rehearsal later, the President of Stockholm University treated us to a delicious lunch in “Spökslottet”, a 17th century mansion said to be haunted–hence its name “Ghost castle.”
Lars Bergstrom, the Stockholm University physicist who gave such a good explanation of the strong interaction, told me that Ingmar Bergmann got the chess-playing-Death motif in Seventh Seal from a mural in the church in his small home town. Even scarier, he told me that the final decision about physics Nobel Prizes, can be reached as late as the morning of the announcement!
David Gross, on my other side, gave me some Nobel-worthy wisdom about the festivities. (I had asked him if one of the laureates ought to propose a thank-you toast to our host.) David said, “This whole event is so well-planned that if we were supposed to do it, someone would have told us. And if nobody told us to do it, we probably shouldn’t.”
Frank and David are now on their third or maybe fourth interview. But I think bloggers blogging about journalists is even more boring than journalists journalizing about bloggers, don’t you?