Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. Ahead of Valentine’s Day, this week’s installment celebrates romantically linked authors and poets of the past and present literary world. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do some further reading. More
To European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, Europe is like a Volkswagen Beetle – an iconic car produced by a once-mighty German manufacturer which has been struggling to adapt to a new world.
“Europe must shift gears,” she urged in a speech to business executives gathered in Davos, Switzerland at the beginning of the year. Yet, her call to arms failed to raise more than an eyebrow. After all, she has repeated the same call many times since she was elected six years ago. So far, there has been little result.
The US president, Donald Trump, may now even be tempted to finish off the EU (the most developed of the world’s multilateral organisations) by dividing its members over the single market for trade. This arrangement is the cornerstone upon which the union was built, but can it withstand Trump’s attempts to play European nations off against each other in order to get the best deal for himself?
The problem is that Trump is simply bringing to its most extreme consequences the weakness of a system that was built for stable times which are long gone. We urgently need a new idea, and it cannot be for a “United States of Europe”. That is a dream from the past that could not be more at odds with Europe’s current political climate.
Mini unions
Europe is unable to chart a path forward because it needs unanimity among its member states in order to make any major decision. Votes are not even weighted to reflect the different sizes of each of the club’s members.
This is a weakness that would gradually cause the deterioration of any international organisation. But in the case of the EU, the crisis is more serious because member states have surrendered part of their decision power. As a result, if the EU cannot move quickly, even member states turn out to be paralysed.
Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, has often been singled out as the bad guy especially – this has happened every time the EU has tried to approve sanctions against Russia or aid to Ukraine. But examples of free riding abound even among the founding parties.
For decades, France has resisted any attempt to reorganise the common agricultural policy that sends a third of the EU’s budget to farmers, many of them French. Italy has halted the ratification of the reform of the European stability mechanism that should protect states from financial instability, out of the assumption among part of the Italian electorate that this may compromise further sovereignty.
Von der Leyen at Davos.
EPA/Laurent Gillieron
Elsewhere, Germany’s constitutional court has derailed the reform of the EU electoral law that divides the election of the European parliament into a dysfunctional system of 27 national contests, because of the resistance of the German political system to any electoral law which is not proportional.
We need to find a way to change all this. And the solution cannot be the rather abstract idea of a union that proceeds at different speeds, where the older members are supposed to be part of an inner circle. Nor is it feasible to expect the abolition of unanimous voting for the simple reason that to forgo unanimity, you need a unanimous vote.
Instead, the EU should become the coordinator of multiple unions, each formed by the member states themselves around specific policies. A union might form around defence, for example, among member states which are ready for such a partnership, such as Poland, the Baltics and Finland.
Another might bring together countries that wish to collaborate on large projects such as a pan-European high-speed train, or a fully integrated energy market that may allow Italy, France and Spain to save billions of euros and decarbonise more quickly.
This is not entirely new. Arrangements like the euro and the free circulation of people (the Schengen area) follow this principle. Only a subset of EU nations are part of these projects, and offers have even been extended to join beyond the EU’s borders. Monaco is in the euro, for example, while Norway is in Schengen, despite neither being an EU member state.
The problem with these unions is that they are incomplete. The complement to the monetary union is a recently reformed “stability pact” that leaves so many loopholes that 11 out of its 20 members do not comply. And even within Schengen, there are still no proper common borders. The result is continuous reciprocal accusations of exporting each other’s illegal migrants.
The solution here is to fully share the levers within a certain policy area on terms which are more flexible and voluntary for the union’s members.
The possibility of calm divorce
Resilience is achieved through adaptability. Therefore, these new arrangements must make divorce between union members possible from the outset – and establish the terms of such a rupture in advance.
And in the event of an extreme case, the other parties should also be able to ask one of the members to leave their union (so as to avoid being systematically held to ransom by a free rider). The current union treaty does contain a provision (article 50) that enables a member to leave, as the UK did – but if Brexit showed anything, it was that this mechanism has limited use at preventing a divorce from descending into chaos.
People should always be part of these decisions, of course. When states decide to surrender some of their sovereignty to a larger organisation such as the EU, it changes the nature of the pact between the citizens of a country and the people who make decisions on their behalf. This evident truth has been ignored for decades as the EU has gradually been built from the top down.
The European Union currently resembles the marriages we once had in Europe (until well into the 20th century), before it was acknowledged that they are a civil (not necessarily religious) contract that can be dissolved through divorce – not some divine construct that can never be undone.
The marriage between EU countries is blighted by cheating and empty rhetoric. This is an issue we can no longer avoid if Europe wants to do more than just “shift gears”. The EU was the most successful political project of the 20th century. If it wants to continue to be so in the 21st, it has to learn to be flexible. Only those who can adapt survive. More
President Trump said on Sunday night that he had ordered the Treasury secretary to stop producing new pennies, a move that he said would help reduce unnecessary government spending.“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” he said in a post on Truth Social. He characterized the production of pennies, which “literally cost us more than 2 cents” each, as wasteful.This is a developing story. Please check here for updates. More
There it was, in the corner of the screen during the climactic moment of Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday: A protester unfurling a combined Palestinian and Sudanese flag just as Lamar — and the entire stadium — sang the “it’s probably A-minooooor” punchline from his chart-topping diss track “Not Like Us.”The N.F.L. said in a statement that the protester was part of the 400-member field cast.“The individual hid the item on his possession and unveiled it late in the show,” the league said. “No one involved with the production was aware of the individual’s intent.”A representative for Roc Nation, the entertainment company behind the halftime show, said in a statement, “The act by the individual was neither planned nor part of the production and was never in any rehearsal.”Amid the dozens of dancers in red, white, blue and black, the individual could be seen standing on the hood of the stage’s centerpiece, a Buick Grand National GNX, the rare car for which Lamar named his latest album, “GNX.” Images from the ground and clips on social media showed a person in black sweats — matching the extras onstage — with “Sudan” and “Gaza” written on the white swath of the flags, alongside a heart and a solidarity fist.As Lamar transitioned into his final song, “TV Off,” from “GNX,” the flag-bearer could be seen jumping from the car and leaving the stage, running in circles with the flag waving in his hands until being tackled by security and removed from the field.Emmanuel Morgan More
President Trump arrived in New Orleans on Sunday, the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, with the wind in his sails.He started the day on the course with the golf legend Tiger Woods (they’ve both been working on a merger between the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit). He issued a proclamation making it “Gulf of America Day” while on Air Force One, ceremoniously cementing his executive order last month to rename the Gulf of Mexico.Of greater significance, he announced that, starting Monday, he would impose a 25 percent tariff on all foreign steel and aluminum imports into the United States. He also said he still intended to move forward with taking over the Gaza Strip, which he described as a “big real estate site” that the United States was “going to own.”He criticized a judge’s ruling against efforts by Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team to gain access to Treasury systems. And he defended his first three weeks in office, which have caused massive strife across the country and the globe.That was all before the game started.Mr. Trump was met with cheers and a mix of boos as he arrived at the Superdome for the game, between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. Among his entourage were his son Eric Trump and Eric’s wife, Lara Trump; his daughter Ivanka Trump; and several Republican leaders.Also at the game is the former first lady Jill Biden, an avid Eagles fan, and her grandson, Beau Biden’s son Hunter. Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose security clearance Mr. Trump revoked on Friday, was not in attendance.Mr. Trump and his courtiers were escorted to a suite at the Superdome, where he was seen standing for the national anthem and saluting.In excerpts from an interview that aired earlier Sunday, Mr. Trump told the Fox News anchor Bret Baier that he had chosen to attend the Super Bowl because he thought it would be a “good thing” for the spirit of the country, which he said has “taken on a whole new life.”Asked who he thought would win the game, Mr. Trump praised the quarterbacks of both teams, but he ultimately said he’d go with Kansas City based on the record of its star quarterback, Patrick Mahomes — who, he added, had “a phenomenal wife” (Brittany Mahomes) who happened to be a “Trump fan.”“It’s going to be just a great game,” Mr. Trump said.Mr. Trump’s team seemed to revel in a day in which Mr. Trump got what he perpetually craves: validation and a large audience.“Good, right?” Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said referring to his reception. More
A federal judge barred the U.S. government on Sunday from sending three detained Venezuelan men to the Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to a lawyer for the migrants.Lawyers for the men, who are detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Mexico, asked the court on Sunday evening for a temporary restraining order, opening the first legal front against the Trump administration’s new policy of sending undocumented migrants to Guantánamo.Within an hour of the filing, which came at the start of the Super Bowl, Judge Kenneth J. Gonzales of the Federal District Court for New Mexico, convened a hearing by videoconference and verbally granted the restraining order, said Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is helping represent the migrants.Immigration and human rights advocates have been stymied in immediately challenging the Trump administration’s policy of sending migrants to Guantánamo, in part because the government has not released the identities of the roughly 50 men it is believed to have flown there so far.But the three Venezuelan men were already represented by lawyers, and their court filing said they had a credible fear that they could be transferred.According to the filing, the men are being held in the same ICE facility, the Otero County Processing Center, where previous groups of men who were flown to Guantánamo in recent days had apparently been held. The men recognized the faces of some of those detainees from government photographs provided to the news media, the filing said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Sometimes game-day strategy extends to style.Well, that’s one way to be part of the team. For her Super Bowl LIX appearance, Taylor Swift, in New Orleans to support her boyfriend Travis Kelce, matched her game-day ’fit to the Chiefs’ game-day uniform.Dropping her usual Kansas City red, she opted for a double-breasted white Saint Laurent blazer over a pair of bedazzled Daisy Dukes and a white Alaïa bodysuit, with thigh-high white stiletto boots.All of that white immediately had some online speculating that Ms. Swift was having a bridal moment and preparing to get engaged (not to mention unexpectedly matching the all-white Akris outfit of Ivanka Trump, who accompanied her father to the game). A more likely explanation is that Ms. Swift was simply coordinating with the white away jerseys of the Chiefs, just like Britney Mahomes. Instead of a red number on her back, Ms. Swift carried a cherry-red Givenchy handbag and wore the ruby red Lorraine Schwartz “T” necklace she had draped around her thigh at the Grammys. (For Travis? For Taylor? Maybe both.)As a result, it was hard not to think that, in the game of fan fashion, she was dressing to win.The blazer and boots were fully in line with what increasingly seems like Ms. Swift’s uniform as chief Chiefs WAG. Over the last season she has become more and more comfortable turning game days into catwalks, matching the tunnel walk of Mr. Kelce with entrance-making looks of her own. As Mr. Kelce said during a recent pre-Super Bowl news conference, “Tay’s always gonna be dressed head-to-toe, looking the flyest.”Early on in their relationship, Ms. Taylor wore mostly fan gear, like the customized Chiefs jacket with Mr. Kelce’s number that was designed by her fellow WAG Kristin Juszczyk (wife of 49er Kyle). But this season Ms. Swift’s stylist, Joseph Cassell, who worked with her on the Eras Tour, has been involved in creating her game-day style. Which, not surprisingly, started to look pointedly similar to her late-stage Eras style (unlike, say, her early fairy princess style or her pandemic flowy folk style).Heavy on the corsets, shorts and boots, her football kit suggests that she decided to give up attempting to disguise herself as just any old fan, and doing so underscores the fact she is one half of a quasi-royal couple, who brings a power base all her own. Whether you like it or not, it’s clearly her on-show comfort zone.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
On This Week’s Episode:Stories from the heart of heartbreak.This is a rerun of an episode that first aired in August 2007.ADD TK IMAGE HERE SMALLNew York Times Audio is home to the “This American Life” archive. Download the app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More
