That was the year Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III, as he was known after his coup d'etat in 1851) was elected President of the Republic. He was, to put it bluntly, a buffoon, who had nothing but the celebrity of his name to recommend him (Napoleon was his uncle). His strongest support came from the…

> America got Sampras and Federer

Ugh, I know the feeling.

I think it's a little closer to France in 1848.

No, I think he's got it right. Sharper ideological sorting can lead to the fringe-most elements have disproportionate influence within parties, and to the lack of common ground to bargain between them.

wtf is mtv lol

Muy sinérgico!

*works out while constantly repeating "You are a piece of shit" to self*

Pretty sure it's actually Shonda Rhimes' new legal thriller on ABC.

Psst, comrade; give this a look-see [pdf].

His erudition was truly remarkable (and more than a little enviable), but his ability to leaven that erudition with good humor, and humaneness, and an earthy good sense that was anything but common is really what sets him apart.

I'd say so. The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum are the essentials. They're philosophically-inclined literary fiction, each with a generous amount of genre trappings (murder mystery in the one case, occult thriller in the other) to help the massive erudition go down easy. (If the world were just, Dan Brown…

It felt like an odd blind spot in the review not to mention that.

I wore a uniform up until high school, whereupon I graduated to a blazer/dress shirt/tie/slacks dress code.

Unfortunately, Amelie just this week declared them to be Intolerable, and we all know the fashion industry takes its cues from the Tolerability Index.

Yeah, I think that's right, and it's the kind of thinking that leads Pollan to make that mistake also makes his position so amenable—to his displeasure, I think—to various forms of social conservatism.

It's … not ideal. I would certainly rather that they'd either not had him join up with Pike, or laid the groundwork better for this change of heart.

Leave it to Evil Lincoln to figure this shit out.

I thought Bellamy's about-face re: Pike last week was terrible; it felt entirely under-motivated. (And if the show thought that the death of that lady whose name I've already forgotten was going to do the job, it's got another thing coming.) But, having made the mistake, better that they stick with it, and I thought…

Of course I had to be taking a drink when he says "… so we're gonna take that away from 'em."