THE URINAL STUDY WON. THE VENUE CHANGED CONTINENTS.

FIELD UNIT 9 · RILEY VEX, ON SCENE · September 2026 · 3 MIN READ

i was sent to zürich to file a story about a relocation.

that is the story. after thirty-five consecutive years in massachusetts, the ig nobel prize ceremony moved to switzerland, because winners and guests and journalists were finding it difficult or unsafe to get into the united states. september 3, kongresshaus, one line in a press release. it is exactly the sort of quiet institutional fact a person can build five hundred clean words around.

i have not been able to do this. i want to walk you through why.

they gave a prize for a splash-free urinal.

four researchers. canada, the united states, china, saudi arabia. theoretical and experimental attempts. that is a coalition. there is a group chat that has been live for years and every message in it is a diagram. somebody in riyadh gets a notification at three in the morning and it says what if the angle.

i am trying to file a story about a relocation.

they gave a prize for gently stepping on venomous snakes.

gently. a team out of são paulo. various parts of various snakes. i need you to sit with various parts. someone drew a chart. someone assigned regions. there is a graduate student — call him Wellington, twenty-four, cargo shorts, hatchback with one door a different color — who was told at the start of term you're on the tail end, and had to decide in that second whether this was the life he chose or the life that chose him.

he took the tail. he is a co-author now. his mother tells people he works with animals.

i am trying to file a story about a relocation.

they gave a prize for cockroach milk proteins.

cockroach. milk.

i accept that the science is real and probably matters. i also need it on the record that somebody has milked a cockroach. that is a sentence with a human being attached to it. that person got up. that person commuted.

they gave a prize for buried underpants.

i do not have further detail and i have elected not to pursue it.

they gave a prize for defining kissing precisely enough to include ants.

they gave a prize for research on smelly teenagers.

they gave a prize for research on candy stealing.

they gave a prize for nose-blowing.

they gave a prize to five economists for amassing evidence that upper-class people are more likely to behave unethically — filed under comedy, shelved permanently beside the urinal, and not one person in that hall appeared to find the arrangement worth a second look.

each winning team received a ten-trillion dollar bill from zimbabwe.

the theme was fungi. actual nobel laureates — the other kind, the real ones — put on mushroom costumes and performed a new operatic song. a person who has won a nobel prize dressed as a mushroom and sang, willingly, in a foreign country, and this did not crack the top three strangest events of the evening.

then several of the world's leading thinkers explained their entire fields twice. first in twenty-four seconds. then again, clearly, in seven words. a man who has given four decades to cell division had to get it down to seven words while a room threw paper at him. i do not know what he said. i hope it was good. i hope somebody wrote it down, because i was at the bar, because by that point in the evening i had stopped being a journalist.

i am trying to file a story about a relocation.

so here it is. it went out in a press release. one line. it sat between the snakes and the mushrooms, at no volume whatsoever, and the assembled international press read it, understood it, and then filed nine hundred words about the urinal.

next year is antwerp. the official announcement describes belgium as a country that will first make you laugh, and then make you think.

they put that in writing. about an entire country. in the same document where they explained they had crossed an ocean for safety reasons.

this organization is afraid of nothing.

Vex, Field Unit 9. the airplanes fly the same everywhere. the snakes were not harmed. Wellington is still in são paulo, on the tail end, which they told him was the safe end, which is exactly what you'd tell him.

cause of death. logistics. manner. voluntary, abroad, with mushrooms.