Here's more on Nobel winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, whose work I confess I'm not at all familiar with.

* Guardian write-up

* N.Y. Times write-up

* BBC write-up

*'Will Le Clézio's Nobel prize cut America down to size? Have the judges of the Nobel prize for literature struck a blow against Coca-colonisation?'

* 'Nobel judges like their books experimental - to the cost of the classic American novelists'

* 'Nobel award restores French literary pride'

* NPR

Hooray for Mondays.

* Yesterday we went to New York to see After Nature at the New Museum and Rififi—the film that singlehandedly gave birth to the very idea of French film noir, according to a quote Ryan saw in the newspaper—at the Film Forum's French Crime Wave series. I officially pronounce both things Worth Doing™, with an extra-special deliciousness shout-out to Kate's Joint at 58 Avenue B in the East Village.

* Rest in peace, Isaac Hayes.

* YouTube video tribute to Jack Kirby, king of comics. Via MeFi.

* I've already made what I consider the definitive comment on election polling, but in case you need more I recommend Matthew Yglesias's post today on tracking polls:

Or maybe none of that happened. As everyone knows, there’s sampling error associated with polling. As a result, if you poll 1,000 people on August 1 and then you poll 1,000 different people on August 2 you shouldn’t be surprised to see the results differ by several percentage points even in the absence of any change in the underlying public opinion. Beyond that, doing one poll per day throughout a long campaign would mean that you’d expect to see one or two relatively rare outlier results per month even under circumstances of total stasis. And as Alan Abramowitz points out if you look at the daily results this is actually what you see — incredible volatility with Obama’s lead oscillating violently around an average of 3-4 points. Since it’s not plausible that the public mood is really swinging anywhere near as rapidly as a very naive reading of the Gallup daily results would suggest, people could see that this is basically statistical noise in a stable race.

But Gallup doesn’t report its daily results, they report a multi-day rolling average. Abramowitz notes that if you report a ten day rolling average, you get a chart where nothing happens — Obama maintains a flat lead of 3-4 points. Again, a stable race. But if instead of doing either of those things you do what Gallup actually does and report a three day rolling average, you get these pleasant looking peaks and valleys in the race. The change over time here is large enough in magnitude (unlike on the ten day chart) but also slow enough in pace (unlike on the one day chart) to be plausibly interpreted as public opinion shifting in response to events. And since the human mind is designed to recognize patterns and construct narratives, and since it suits the interests of campaign journalists to write narratives, people interpret the peaks and valleys of the three day average as real shifts in public opinion. But while I have no way of proving that it’s just statistical noise and nothing’s really happening, the “nothing happening” narrative is completely consistent with the data, and it’s telling that the conventional narratives collapse when the data is presented in different ways whereas the “noise” narrative is consistent with multiple ways of displaying the information.

I'll only add that given the extent to which polls serve as a bulwark for functional democracy and accountable elections, the increasing sensationalization of polls as a means to drive news ratings rather than to reliably monitor public opinion is a very, very disturbing trend.

Polls should be boring. They should be so boring no one cares what they say.

* And Jesse Taylor has the best hypothetical history of the presidential primary I've seen:

Any number of things could have swayed the primary. But at the end of the day, Clinton apologizing for her Iraq vote (or just not having voted that way in the first place) would have guaranteed her the nomination. Or her running for Senate in Illinois.

I really think that's right. If she'd decided to run for Senate in Illinois rather than New York, she'd have had it.

Friday night environmentalism.

* Researchers at MIT have apparently achieved a major breakthrough in battery technology, making solar that much more practical as a potential alternative energy source for the post-cheap-oil world. More at MeFi and Daily Kos.

* Unprecedented warming, melting forces Arctic tourist evacuation. Global warming is a myth.

* How much oil can be found in Americans’ car — through more efficient driving and better vehicle maintenance? Using current numbers from the Bush DOE and EPA , the answer appears to be some 2.5 to 3 million barrels a day — 20 times what could be found if we ended the congressional moratorium on offshore drilling and three times the oil we are likely to find in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

* And Climate Progress demystifies the French nuclear power system, elaborating on just what it would mean for the U.S. to adopt a similar program here:

"If France can produce 80% of its electricity with nuclear power, why can’t we?"

McCain seems to forget we are a much, much larger country than France. Heck, we already have more nuclear reactors than they do. To achieve McCain’s goal, we’d need 500 to 700+ new nuclear reactors plus 5 to 7 Yucca mountains, at a cost of some $4 trillion. Not to mention the soaring electricity bills Americans would have to suffer through, with electricity from new nukes projected at some $0.15 a kilowatt hour — some 50% higher than current national rates — not even counting transmission (or reprocessing).

There's more at the link, particularly some needed stats on the subject of nuclear fuel recycling and nuclear safety. I've been warming to the possibility of nuclear energy as an unavoidable component of our attempts to keep technological civilization afloat; maybe I'll have to rethink that...