The velocity of certain actions – a swift kick to the seat of the pants, a high-speed Keystone pursuit, the sudden collision of face and patisserie – might almost persuade us otherwise, but slapstick is in truth sedulously devoted to the study of slowness.

After all the layers of subcontractors had taken their cut, there was next to nothing left for the people doing the work. For instance, the author Mike Davis tracked the way FEMA paid Shaw $175 a square foot to install blue tarps on damaged roofs, even though the tarps themselves were provided by the government. Once all the subcontractors took their share, the workers who actually hammered in the tarps were paid as little as $2 a square foot. “Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung,” Davis wrote, “where the actual work is carried out.”

Authoritarians tend to have really comprehensive infrastructure plans, which usually contributes to their appeal. From British roads in the nineteenth century to Hitler’s Autobahn to power grid repairs by ISIS to, uh, Immortan Joe’s Citadel, anyone seeking the legitimacy afforded a state understands that maintaining infrastructure not only builds goodwill (or at least subservience), it’s also a tremendous display of power.

Price remembers the day of the week for every date since 1980; she remembers what she was doing, who she was with, where she was on each of these days. She can actively recall a memory of 20 years ago as easily as a memory of two days ago, but her memories are also triggered involuntarily.

Finding the Blank Spaces in a Well-Mapped World

The waters he is entering have been described in navigation books as among “the most difficult in Greenland; the mountains rise almost vertically from the sea to form a narrow bulwark, with rifts through which active glaciers discharge quantities of ice, while numerous off-lying islets and rocks make navigation hazardous.”

In May’s speech to the 2002 Conservative party conference – through which she first came to national prominence – she called her party “nasty” and complained that Tony Blair’s Labour government, which had won its second landslide election victory the year before, had borrowed “some of our rhetoric”. Something similar could be said in reverse of May’s discourse since becoming prime minister

If Le Pen is now the closest she has ever been to the French presidency, it is in large part down to her working partnership with Philippot, whose judgment she trusts so completely that she rarely takes a decision without consulting him. “They have an intellectual bond; they are in complete agreement on basic principles,”

The Economist reports:

One cannot lead France, he declared during the Republicans’ primary last year, unless one is “beyond reproach”. It turned out that Mr Fillon had employed his wife, Penelope, possibly from as far back as 1988, for a total pre-tax sum of over €800,000 ($863,000), as well as two of his children when they were law students. This is not illegal; one French deputy in five employs a relative. But the newspaper could find no trace that Mrs Fillon had done any work. And in an old video clip she said had never been her husband’s assistant.

Centrist wonks lament party polarization, but rarely point out that it’s not something that just happened. In the context of heterogeneous political geography and malleable district boundaries, a two-party system doesn’t yield the centrism it is often credited with, but a superficial and artificial polarization that demands an eventual populist response. Party polarization is the endogenous and predictable result of incentives created by a first-past-the-post voting system susceptible to gerrymandering.

“I think that under Trump we’re going to be in for a lot more of brands for social justice, because, I suspect, a lot of people are going to be unhappy with him, even if they supported him … a lot of companies will be able to position themselves as being against the current system, when really in fact they’re not against it at all.”