Meredith Klein

Silly. Smart. Sassy. Lover of all things royal. Examiner of history. Anglophile. Literary fanatic. Firm believer of actions speaking louder than words.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

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.

[ً @BALUCIAGA]

there’s a real answer to this actually

[𝑺𝑰𝑵𝑨🐵 @109_72_95]

펀치가 두발로 우뚝 일어난 모습이 너무 귀엽다
팔다리가 엄청 길어진 펀치쿤
펀치가 일어서자 관람객분들의 감탄소리가 이어지는것도 너무 귀여우시다

이제 제법 형 원숭이 느낌이 나네요 🐵💗
동생이 제일 많은 1살 원숭이 펀치쿤

Th. t.sasano0103

[Meredith Klein @MerKlein]

💜🎸🎶🎤🎹💜

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

This is just so brilliant… wow🔥

England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 vs Norway 🇳🇴

Credit: @higgsfield

[1776 Live @250YearsAgoLive]

Thomas Jefferson submits the final draft of his Declaration of Independence to Continental Congress.

[Martina Markota @MartinaMarkota]

I cannot stop watching this. I’m dying laughing at the effectiveness of this pointing & the seriousness of it. Incredible. https://t.co/97I3X4jQOY

[Rick D @RickD_GK]

We really are blessed with pets, and could learn something from them.

This cat knows his buddy, dog, is sick and brings him his toy since he can't get up... that little tail wag. ❤️

[Punch & Me Against the World 🌎 🐒 @Punchkunupdate]

Punch, when he doesn't want to leave Miyakoshi, he jumps around like a tiny little donut

[Meredith Klein @MerKlein]

@erichustls Ready :)

[Iamemperor @Iamemperor00]

My friend accidentally became the leader of a cult because he was too awkward to correct people.

It started at a farmer’s market.

He was there selling homemade candles because his girlfriend said he needed “a hobby that involved sunlight.” He named the candle brand something stupidly deep like The Hollow Path because apparently “Lavender Breeze” wasn’t artistic enough.

Anyway, while setting up his table, he knocked over an old woman’s drink. He panicked and started apologizing aggressively.

Like full rapid-fire:
“No no no this is symbolic somehow, I’m so sorry, the universe clearly wanted us to reset spiritually—”

And the woman just froze.

Then she grabbed his wrist and whispered,
“You see signs too.”

Wrong answer.

Instead of clarifying, he got nervous and did that little polite half-smile people do when they don’t understand what’s happening.

That smile changed his life forever.

Because apparently this woman belonged to one of those “energy alignment” communities where everybody wears beige and talks like haunted yoga instructors.

She bought six candles immediately.

Then she returned the next weekend with friends.

Not normal friends either.

These people looked handcrafted.

Flowing linen clothes.
Tiny silver rings.
The kind of eye contact that makes you feel psychologically searchable.

They gathered around his candle booth asking questions like:
“What inspired your awakening?”
“How long have you been practicing?”
“Do you teach?”

And because my friend is incapable of confrontation, he started answering vaguely instead of saying “I literally work at Best Buy.”

“Oh, you know… life experiences.”
“Everybody’s on their own journey.”
“I think silence teaches us a lot.”

BOOM.

Now he’s a mystic.

Word spread unbelievably fast.

Within a month these people were driving hours to attend his “sessions,” which were literally just him sitting in public parks trying to avoid conversation.

But his silence became part of the mythology.

If he stared at a tree for too long people would whisper:
“He’s grounding himself.”

No.
He just forgot where he parked.

One woman burst into tears because he told her,
“You already know the answer.”

He later admitted he only said that because he wasn’t listening.

Then came the newsletter.

Somebody made a website for him without asking.

There were quotes attributed to him that he never even said.

“Stillness is the loudest truth.”
— Eli Vance

WHO IS ELI VANCE???

That’s not even his name.

But he didn’t correct them because by this point he was getting free lunches and people kept gifting him expensive tea.

Then things got financially dangerous.

Followers started donating money “to support the movement.”

This terrified him.

He tried discouraging them by saying:
“You shouldn’t rely on one person for guidance.”

And these lunatics interpreted it as:
“Wow. He’s humble.”

At one gathering someone asked him if material wealth mattered.

He shrugged and said,
“I mean… rent definitely matters.”

People wrote that down too.

Eventually his girlfriend found out the full extent of the situation after walking into their apartment and seeing twelve strangers sitting silently in a circle around him while he ate soup.

One woman looked at the girlfriend and whispered,
“The Teacher is nourishing.”

She almost called the police.

My friend finally decided to end everything after they announced a retreat in the mountains that HE DIDN’T EVEN PLAN.

Apparently his followers had organized it themselves and expected him to deliver “teachings under the moon.”

So he panicked and told them the truth.

All of it.

He admitted he had no spiritual wisdom.
No hidden knowledge.
No awakening.

He said he was just anxious and accidentally charismatic.

Silence.

Total silence.

Then one guy in the back starts crying softly and says:
“The final lesson… ego death.”

And everybody nodded.

[Hugh Laurie @hughlaurie]

Thanks for your critique, Janet. We actually tried a couple of episodes where House (Hugh Laurie) (please put the brackets in the right place) gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy.

One could apply your trenchant analysis to other art forms: JS Bach wrote 30 Goldberg variations on the same chord structure; Frida Kahlo painted 50 portraits of herself; Henry Moore, what??

The point is, or was, variations on a theme; if all you see is hospital, medical blah blah, then it wasn’t meant for you.

Nonetheless, I look forward to your first novel!

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

This footage came from a home security camera inside a house in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The elderly man in the pajamas is Harold.

He’s 79 years old and lives with a progressive memory condition that sometimes causes severe nighttime confusion something doctors often call “sundowning.”

Late at night, Harold occasionally wakes up believing he still has somewhere important to be.

Work.
An appointment.
A meeting from decades ago.

He’ll quietly get dressed and head toward the front door.

Before last year, it happened several times a week.

Twice, he actually made it outside before his wife Carol could stop him.

Once, a neighbor found him wandering down the street at 11 PM wearing slippers.

The family tried alarms.

Harold learned how to disable them.

Then everything changed because of a dog named Samson.

Samson was a two-year-old Golden Retriever their daughter brought over temporarily after a housing issue.

Nobody expected him to become Harold’s nighttime guardian.

A few weeks after Samson arrived, Carol checked the security footage from the previous night after realizing she hadn’t heard Harold get up.

At 1:17 AM, the camera showed Harold walking slowly toward the front door.

But Samson was already waiting there.

Harold tried to move around him.

Samson stepped sideways and blocked the path.

Harold tried again.

Samson calmly repositioned himself a second time.

Then the dog gently took Harold’s pajama sleeve in his mouth and slowly guided him back down the hallway toward the bedroom.

And Harold followed him.

The family later showed the footage to Harold’s neurologist.

The doctor reportedly watched it twice before explaining:

“This is recognized redirection behavior used for memory-related wandering. The dog is doing it correctly — instinctively — without training.”

Now Samson sleeps at the foot of Harold’s bed every night.

When Harold was told what Samson had been doing for him, he looked at the dog for a long moment and simply said:

“Well… somebody has to look after things around here.”

Sometimes the right soul arrives at exactly the right moment.

And sometimes it walks in on four legs.

[Sportskeeda NASCAR @NASCARatSK]

Audrey Larson won her dirt race last night in Nebraska and then hit the Kyle Busch bow 🏁❤️

#AudreyLarson #KyleBusch

[Whiskey Riff @WhiskeyRiff]

Kyle Larson's son Owen going up to give his friend Brexton Busch a hug. Hits you right in the feels.

[Meredith Klein @MerKlein]

🪽💔✝���8️⃣🪽

May they forever know how much they are supported. I think it’s safe to say every NASCAR fan feels the legacy Kyle leaves behind. The strength to be there…wow. Can’t wait to see Brexton carry on the famous Busch skills in the future.

[BlackRedGuard ☭ 🇵🇸🔻⛓️‍💥 @OGBlackRedGuard]

Dale Earnhardt was the most redneck redneck to ever redneck and he took the confederate flag off his car because his Black housekeeper said she didn’t want to see it. It’s really not that hard to not be an asshole.

[The Classic Salon @Axaxia88]

A female elephant sees a baby hippopotamus leave its herd and toddle off toward the lake to play. Knowing that crocodiles are lurking in the water, it tries to chase the baby hippo back to the safety of its group. 💖✨

When it meets the mother hippo, it’s basically like:
“Please keep an eye on your child, ma’am hippo.” 😔

[Son of a son of a Jeff @mr4time]

I’m sitting here crying over a driver I actively rooted against for nearly 20 years. I don’t mean to be crass, but this is such bullshit. His kids were robbed of their dad. His wife was robbed of her husband. Kurt was robbed of his brother. His parents were robbed of their son.