Monday Night Links

Here's all the stuff I wanted to blog about over the past week, but couldn't get to for one reason or another.

Daily Kos has a must-read post that uses Sarah Palin's words to extrapolate that she has consigned herself to Hell (literally).

I know Christopher Hitchens gets a lot of flack around these parts, but his Vanity Fair piece on Eton, despite his usual pomposity, makes for interesting reading.

Christopher Buckley, the son of the late conservative intellectual William F Buckley, and a fantastic novelist in his own right, comes out for Barack Obama. Of the few movement conservatives who have broken for Obama, I find Buckley's endorsement the most telling. Unlike, say, Andrew Sullivan, who clearly likes Obama and is trying to foist some of his right-wing positions on him, Buckley says straight up that Obama is extremely liberal but he cannot bring himself to vote for a man who would chose Sarah Palin as his running mate and conduct a disgusting campaign.

The always insightful Mike Atherton explains why it is so difficult for foreign coaches to succeed in India and Pakistan (it is telling that he left out Sri Lanka).

India presents different problems, in so much as it is not the unpredictability that challenges a coach, but the lack of it. Chappell wanted to modernise Indian ways and challenge what he saw as a cosy club of ageing, unathletic stars. But anyone who wants to challenge the status quo must remember that it is the players in India who call the shots. Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly are icons, wealthy and revered beyond measure, and used to playing on their terms or not at all.

At the end of his five years coaching in India, Wright reflected on his experiences in his book, Indian Summers. He recalled one of his first training sessions, how the players got off the team bus, leaving their kit for porters to take to the nets, how they sat in wicker armchairs while tea and biscuits were brought and how “when they did go for a run they set a pace that a tortoise with a double hip replacement would have found comfortable”. Post-independence cricket, the maharaja way.

The new Nobel prize winner in literature may not be as well known as you might expect:

According to the author's official biography, Le Clézio was born in 1940 in Nice and has lived in France, Mauritius (where his family has roots), Nigeria, Thailand and Mexico. He got off to an auspicious start with his first novel, Le procès-verbal (The Interrogation) in 1963. His breakthrough evidently came in 1980 with the publication of Désert. His more recent writings have captured Le Clézio in a more self-preoccupied mood, with Onitsha (1991), La quarantine (1995), L'Africain (2004) and Ballaciner (2007) each carrying autobiographical elements.

Or so the Swedish Academy tells us. Good luck finding any of these titles at your local English-language bookstore.

Montreal-based chain Archambault runs 12 bookstores, all in Quebec. Its website lists 17 of Le Clézio's books available in French. The English side of the site, meanwhile, has one result: Wandering Star, a 2004 translation of his 1992 novel Étoile errante.

And what do you guys think about Paul Krugman winning the economics prize? Since I have never studied Econ, I just assumed he was a well-regarded economist who became a bitter NYT columnist. I never realized that he had contributed original economic theories of his own.

Our favourite right-wing nut jobs over at World Net Daily reveal that Barack Obama is too dumb to have written Dreams From My Father. Their obvious conclusion: William Ayers wrote it.

The New Yorker has a fantastic piece (is that a redundant statement to make?) on the Republican war on words.

And, finally, here's why Google has inspired a large base of fanboys that can compete with the Apple crowd in enthusiasm if not misplaced superiority:

Gmail, Google's free consumer e-mail, added a unique new feature to the service Monday: Mail Goggles, which gives you the ability to double check whether you are really sure you want to send an e-mail message, particularly late at night..Here's how Mail Goggles works: it allows you to preset what times you want Gmail to double check if you're sure you want to send an e-mail. (You can add Mail Goggles by going to "Settings" in the right hand corner of Gmail and then clicking on the "Labs" tab, where it is listed as a new feature). If you enable the feature, it will default to double-checking with you that you want to send e-mails in the wee hours of Friday and Saturday by making you solve some simple math problems.