Episode Details

For some laureates, the Nobel Prize marked the beginning of the end. Writers who won it stopped writing. Scientists who won it lost their edge. A few were driven to depression, alcoholism, or worse by the weight of the world's highest honor.

This episode examines the dark side of the Nobel Prize and asks why the recognition meant to crown a life's work so often became the thing that ended it.

• The writers who produced nothing significant after winning
• How sudden fame disrupted the routines that made great work possible
• The pressure to live up to an impossible standard
• Why Alfred Nobel's own troubled life foreshadowed the prize's paradox