Tuesday morning roundup

India's troubled power sector.

Maryland's oyster war has evolved.

Never neglect your career, ladies.

I like peace and quiet when I travel, too, and I can't afford to travel first class. I'm not sure what class has to do with it: I like to watch my opera in peace and quiet, too, and the people in the orchestra seats who opted to comment now and then during Porgy and Bess last night were hardly hurting. But the best part of that article follows:

Last year, worried about how an impeccably pedigreed Tory candidate named Annunziata Rees-Mogg would go over with the hoi polloi, Mr. Cameron suggested that she might want to campaign under the name “Nancy Mogg.”

She refused, although, to be fair, another candidate, the spectacularly named Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, dutifully “de-toffed” himself by downgrading to “Richard Drax” on campaign posters.

Meanwhile, Ms. Rees-Mogg’s brother, Jacob, a banker who is also running for Parliament and who appears to believe he belongs to the “Brideshead Revisited” era, having once taken his childhood nanny with him on the campaign trail, went on television to denounce Mr. Cameron’s plan to get more women and minorities elected as the triumph of “potted plants” over “intellectually able people.”

This book is on my list; the introductory observation of the review is great: there's no mistaking that Russian literature is not French literature.

Some of these letters on the RSVP issue are just annoying, particularly the first one. I'm sorry everyone else bores the crap out of you, but no one requires you to actually grace others with your presence; merely let your host know not to account for it.

Umbra agrees: the dating pool is full of d-bags.

I'd better start following Ruth Reichl's food haikus.