Business Standard on Bazball: “It was an informal meeting between Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes in May 2022 that turned English cricket on its head, taking it from humiliation to triumph. From self-doubt to where they are placed currently: England have won 13 of their last 18 Tests, and staged a resounding comeback from being 2-0 down to draw the high-octane Ashes series, which concluded on July 31. The meeting came days after McCullum (nicknamed Baz) was appointed England’s head coach, and Stokes the Test captain. England had registered just a solitary win from 17 Tests when they took over the reins at the start of the 2022 summer. They agreed English cricket needed a dose of flair and a dash of insouciance to get them out of the doldrums. What followed was one of the most captivating revolutions in the sport, with England, a hitherto dour and rudderless team, metamorphosing into an irresistible outfit. England adopted an ultra-aggressive approach, which was governed by intent, aggression, and instincts, without worrying about the consequences.”
NYTimes: “While elite players tend to have an uncommonly deep knowledge of the dictionary, many of them tell me that having a large natural vocabulary isn’t always a big advantage. “This is not necessarily the kind of game where English professors always win,” said Mina Le, an ear, nose and throat surgeon who is ranked 110th among Scrabble players in the United States. “The players at the top level tend to have some mathematical ability,” she added, noting that knowledge of probabilities, knowing the distribution of the remaining tiles in the bag and thinking a few turns ahead are all far more valuable than simply making an aesthetic play with a cool word. “It’s less of a word-finding game, and more of a word-picking game,” said Will Anderson, a North American Scrabble Championship winner.”
Forrest McDonald (1987): “Political promotion of economic development is inherently futile, for it invariably rewards incompetence; if incompetence is rewarded, incompetence will be the product; and when incompetence is the product, politicians will insist that increased planning and increased regulation is the appropriate remedy.” [via CafeHayek]
Balram Yadav: “India is one of the biggest agricultural countries in the world. More than half the population depends on agriculture and its allied sectors for livelihood. The country has the second-largest area under agriculture, after China, and is one of the largest crop-based food producers. It ranks among the top 10 global agri exporters with agriculture constituting about 12 per cent of all domestic merchandise exports annually. And yet, these singular achievements hide the real potential of the Indian agriculture sector whose growth has averaged a modest 4.6 per cent in recent years. This is in spite of the fact that – in the course of 75 years of independence – the ‘land of the farmer’ has evolved from a state of food shortage to one of food surplus.”
Mint: “The power of a library that offers free membership (no security deposit and no fee for the use of its reading room, the internet, book issuance, late returning of books or for losing them) does not reside in its capacity to produce an automaton-like desire among people for revolution. It offers something much more complicated: the possibility of dialogue among disparate elements of our democracy, among people walled apart from one another long before there was a largest democracy in the world. A free library addresses the caste system so it can undo it.”
