Following on K.’s most recent post (“Musical Offering: Introducing France’s Future First Lady,” 13 January 2008), I have been stewing over Matthew Yglesias’s dinging of the prudery and narrow-mindedness of U.S. politics (“A Different World,” TheAtlantic.com, 9 January 2008):

French President Nicholas Sarkozy got divorced early in his term, is dating a supermodel and his son’s writing songs for radical French rappers. Not only does American politics seem remarkably focused on relatively unimportant personal trivia, but our politicians don’t even have interesting trivia.