Just attended an academic conference in Washington DC, where I found myself in a two bizarre alternative universes: the academic one, and the Pentagon one. I'll talk about the latter tomorrow.

The isolation of the academy is no story here: everybody knows professors (I'm hoping to become one) are a little off-center to start with, so when you get a couple thousand of them in one conference center, their eccentricity magnifies. It's one of the few times a year where everybody is like them. This one was the German Studies Association.

So, when I got there last Friday, the conference was abuzz about the just-announced Nobel Prize ... for Literature. It went to Herta Müller, a German who grew up in the German diaspora in Romania. From all I can tell, this is a worthy prize winner, so I don't mean to dismiss it.

But that morning the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to the US President, whose residence was two miles away. All of Washington was talking about it. People were debating it on the subway, with strangers.

As soon as I got to the conference hotel, I heard the word Nobel in a conversation--but it was the literature one they were discussing. Sure, that's not remarkable, but it happened all day. Dozens of times, people were talking about the literature prize; not once did I hear mention of the peace prize.

This is neither good nor bad. For me it was mostly an impressive display of the power of community to shape reality. Washington DC is a strange place, and so is the academy. And when you only hang with policy wonks, politics can become the lens through which you view reality. The same holds for academics.

But rarely do you get to see such a fun showcase of professorial wierdness.