"During his campaign in 2006, Sarkozy notoriously dismissed the 17th century French novel La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette, arguing that civil service entrance exams should not include questions about such painfully irrelevant subjects. A great crowd of unsuspected Madame de La Fayette fans arose, holding marathon public readings of La Princesse de Clèves ..."
"The filmmaker Yann Moix concurred in the political journal La Règle du jeu, pointing out that since the Panthéon is the 'Académie française for dead people," these days Camus is surely both "sufficiently academic and sufficiently dead to repose there.' "
France, I love you.
"If China’s emissions keep climbing as they have for the past thirty years, the country will emit more of those gases in the next thirty years than the United States has in its entire history."
"The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator butthe largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe."
“ 'We have a religion,' an American physicist and cernlifer named Steven Goldfarb confessed one day over lunch, 'and that’s symmetry.' ”
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