Dear Mr. President, I am writing from the tram. My shoes are wet again. This is not a metaphor. Oslo has decided it is October and therefore the rain is simply hanging in the air, judging everyone who walks under it, and I have once more failed the rain's inspection. There is a half-eaten kanelbull in my pocket that someone's wife sent to the meeting. It has put cinnamon sugar on my coat. I will not explain this further. We met this morning. Five of us. Coffee. The portraits. Mandela looking as if he already knows how the day will go. The one we do not discuss still hanging there, 1973, bombs still falling, two predecessors having resigned, Tom Lehrer having declared political satire obsolete. We leave him up. Every family has the uncle who once did something, after which everyone simply agreed to keep passing the potatoes. You will be pleased to hear that your name came up. Not because anyone nominated you in a way that counted, those had to be in by the 31st of January, which is to say before you had, by your own arithmetic, finished ending the wars, but because several people kept phoning and posting and then announcing that they had phoned and posted. Israel's prime minister put it on the internet. The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced their nominations as though the announcing were part of the scoring. Iran, as usual, was both on the list and not on the list, depending on which day the fish was measured. A man flew around the world collecting endorsements the way one collects signatures against a noisy dog. We watched. Norwegians are good at watching. We have long winters and very little else. The number of wars, we noticed, kept increasing. Eight, then more. Like a fish. Every time someone said the number, the fish had grown an inch. Sometimes Iran was the extra one; sometimes it was already finished and also still ongoing. We did not weigh the fish. We do not grade homework. "He made peace" is not a sentence that ends in a medal, no matter how loudly it is said or how many heads of state are asked to say it into a phone. The will of a dead Swede who invented dynamite and spent his final years trying to launder the phrase "merchant of death" does not, it turns out, contain a clause about volume. So we gave it to an eighty-five-year-old woman who was, at the hour we told the world, sitting in courtroom 600 in Nuremberg. The actual room. The one where the law once stared down the precise kind of man who believes wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his. She did not phone us. She did not post. No one flew anywhere on her behalf. She wanted the work and not the medal. The medal found her anyway. This is not a rule we wrote down. It is simply the only pattern that has survived a hundred years of our mistakes. Which brings me to the purpose of this note. Since the calendar already closed the window, and since the prize itself has a well-documented allergy to anyone who explains, in public, at length, why he deserves it, I have decided to send you the one form of recognition that can actually be purchased. A $9 participation trophy. Eight for the wars. Plus one for Iran, which refused to stay counted and therefore, we felt, deserved its own line. Not a medal. Not a portrait on a wall. Not even a cinnamon bun. Just the ordinary, honest kind of prize, the kind that does not flee the moment you reach for it. I have marked the memo "Nobel condolences," which is the closest thing to the real article your campaign will accept by card. Think of it as the uncle's contribution. Or the rain's. Or the fish's, including the Iranian one that would not hold still long enough to be weighed. We are only five damp people in a room with wet shoes and a long table and a plate of buns that is always, somehow, already empty. We have been wrong before. Kissinger is still on the wall. We may be wrong again; a future committee may one day hang a portrait of this very morning and decline, forever, to explain why. But not this year. This year the old woman in Nuremberg got a phone call she did not ask for, and you get nine dollars and a note from a man whose shoes are wet. Takk for the eight wars. And the extra dollar, for Iran. The number is no longer our problem. Kristin said "well" an hour ago. I have to change trams.

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good. I know. I know. I think about it on the tram. We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle. It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species. Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate. 287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself. We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it. Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name. A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog. And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters. People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all. So who did we give it to? An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us. She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown. The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him. Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept. It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall. But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for. That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it. We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was. He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him. Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.