Taboo and Repugnant Roundup (Week of 1/12/26)

This week’s roundup spans symbolic honors, moral limits of markets, and biomedical supply chains. It opens with the Nobel Committee’s statement reaffirming the inalienability of the Nobel Prize after Trump-related commentary, situating that rule within familiar corruption arguments about honorific goods (as developed by Sandel and Radin). It then turns to the Financial Times’ 2026 books list, which features Alvin Roth’s forthcoming Moral Economics, and concludes with Georgetown University’s announcement of a new Blood and Plasma Research Group devoted to interdisciplinary research on ethically contested biological materials.