Just a moment — I have to put down the latest page-turner by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio before I can finish this post (you’re doing the same, right?). The latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced today after a firestorm: Last week Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, announced that no American writers would win the award because the US is “too isolated, too insular” and its novelists “don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature — that ignorance is restraining,” which prompted a one-word rebuttal from the Guardian and one from Charles McGrath of the New York Times, who wrote: “Critics are always pointing out that the list of writers who never won, which includes Tolstoy, Proust, Borges, Joyce, Nabokov and Auden, is far more impressive than the roster of those who did.” Which roster would you choose? Search the complete list here.

A few recent breakthroughs in the study of artificial intelligence might have HAL 9000 reaching for a stress pill: First off, meet Repliee R-1, a five-year-old Japanese girl “built to help pensioners and disabled people move better”; the Observer reports that “next Sunday, six computer programs — ‘artificial conversational entities’ — will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognized ‘thinking’ machine; and last Monday, scientists at MIT in Cambridge announced that they have “moved closer to creating ‘artificial noses,’ after finding a way to mass-produce smell receptors in a laboratory.
Artificial noses could one day replace dogs that sniff out drugs and explosives, and could have numerous medical applications including identifying diseases that have distinct odor.”

Amid the backlash from all the bungling this week on Capitol Hill, one interesting item slipped through the cracks: Last Friday, the House of Representatives recommended that Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, “should be granted a presidential pardon for a racially motivated conviction 75 years ago that blemished his reputation and hurt his boxing career” (read more at ESPN); Johnson, who was convicted of violating the Mann Act, which outlawed the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes, was the cover story of our Boxing Issue, released in 2005 (click here to read an excerpt of our interview with Ken Burns in support of his film about Johnson, Unforgivable Blackness). Now forgivable!

The Cleveland-born actor and anti-hero who passed away this weekend after a battle with cancer is being remembered in many ways: as a film legend (the Guardian); a humanitarian (Time); a race car driver (ESPN); a friend (Robert Redford’s tribute) and a living landmark (reflections from his hometown paper, the Connecticut Post).

No golden shovels here. Crews excavating the World Trade Center site “have uncovered features carved into the bedrock by glaciers about 20,000 years ago, including a 40-foot-deep pothole”; in downtown Chicago, Donald Trump found he has no tenants in the four floors of commercial space at the base of his 92-story Trump International Hotel & Tower, which is still under construction (though this interactive page on the Tribune site does reveal some stunning panoramic views); and residents in California have found that their newly installed solar panels are vanishing from their rooftops in a bizarre rash of burglaries.

While many towering band leaders who passed away this year have been properly immortalized in American newspapers and bible-thick British music magazines, a few important studio musicians and session players have passed away recently, with considerably less fanfare: jazz saxophonist Johnny Griffin, famous in Chicago for his “blowing sessions“; Buddy Harmon, the Nashville drummer who played on Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man”; Norman Whitfield, producer and arranger for Motown Records whose signature song was “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”; and Earl Palmer, pictured here, the New Orleans drummer who played on such rock classics as “Tutti Frutti” and “La Bamba,” as well as Phil Spector productions like “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” and “River Deep, Mountain High.” RIP.

Although Chicago is primed to reclaim the title of possessing the tallest North American skyscraper and has recently unveiled, according to the New York Times, “perhaps the most aggressive plan of any major American city” to change building codes to promote energy efficiency, all is not necessarily good along the Lakefront: That is the sinking feeling you get when scrolling through the Chicago Tribune’s slideshow of “significant historical buildings that are in danger of demolition or substantial alteration” — the list, compiled by the non-profit preservation group Landmarks Illinois, includes works by such towering figures as Bertrand Goldberg and Frank Lloyd Wright. Click here for more from the Trib, and here for a link to the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Though not as excruciating as this notorious clip of a Dutch TV host laughing at his own guests, Greta Van Sustren’s recent interview with the “First Dude” of Alaska has earned its spot as one of the more awkward recorded conversations in recent memory (while difficult to surpass evergreens like Miss South Carolina or Tom Cruise on Scientology, the Dude clip can immediately join the ranks of David Icke proclaiming himself the son of God on a British talk show, a Spelling Bee champ eating screen time on CNN, or this white interviewer’s attempts to jive with NBA star Sam Cassell). True cringe.

Tributes to David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest and numerous influential magazine pieces who committed suicide at his California home this past weekend, continue to post: Adam Begley of the New York Observer; Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times; LA Times; Salon; Slate; Guardian; Telegraph; Newsweek. For more on Wallace, revisit his 1997 interview on The Charlie Rose Show and his 2004 piece, “Consider the Lobster.”

Since leaving his post at Ebert & Roeper in July to focus on health issues, Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert has turned to advocacy in the pages of his flagship newspaper: First there was his thumbs-down rebuttal to departing sports columnist and provocateur Jay Mariotti (”Jay the Rat,” screams the headline), and now — following word that “a fellow critic yelled at him and whacked him on the knee with a program during a movie screening at the Toronto Film Festival last weekend” — comes an uncharacteristic analysis of a political phenomenon, “The American Idol candidate.” Click here to read Ebert’s interview with STOP SMILING in our Chicago Issue.