Dear Micky Arison,

I was sorry to hear about the Costa Concordia. What a big fuck-up, a große Verhau, as Kluge would put it. A sad one to boot.

Unless you’ve avoided all sports news since Thanksgiving, you’ve probably heard the name Tim Tebow, the Denver Broncos quarterback and evangelical Christian who likes to thank his lord and savior Jesus Christ for winning football games. Despite his awkward throwing motion and his dismal stats, Tebow still led his team to six “miraculous” comebacks, including completing an unlikely 80-yard pass in the first seconds of overtime to beat the favored Pittsburgh Steelers in a playoff game last week. Already controversial from his college days — his painting John 3:16 in his eyeblack prompted the NCAA to ban the practice — and from a Focus on the Family-sponsored anti-abortion ad that ran during the 2010 Super Bowl, Tebow’s eagerness to talk about his faith as much as win games has made him a touchstone for a debate about the role of religion in sports. “Tebowing” has even become a verb, describing the act of dropping to one knee and touching one’s forehead in apparent praise of God as Tebow frequently does.

With its focus on a destabilized European government, currency manipulation, and the frailty of technocracy, Georges Simenon’s novella The President seems a surprisingly timely book, especially considering it was originally published more than 50 years ago. The scene in which Simenon describes various ministers meeting at a country retreat to decide the fate of the franc in the midst of a financial crisis could easily be taken for a fictionalized rendering of any number of the E.U.’s serial efforts to save to the euro. “After the disastrous experiments made by previous governments, which had lived from day to day, robbing Peter to pay Paul, the only solution was a large-scale devaluation…”

But the novella also explores the timeless theme of the pettiness engendered by power and the cumulative personal sacrifices it necessarily compels. Simenon, whose attitude toward writing was something like ordinary people’s attitude toward breathing, seems to have known something about pettiness and certainly about compulsion. In a 2007 Bookforum profile, Luc Sante summarizes some of the highlights of Simenon’s prolific career: his anti-Semitic journalism, his boasting about sleeping with thousands of prostitutes, his becoming a collaborator during the Vichy regime, his ego-driven feuds with publishing houses, and so on. Sante suggests Simenon was one of those writers “whose finer qualities have been siphoned off into their books,” which means, considering the hundreds of novels he wrote, he might have been an extraordinarily fine man.