Sell­ing books is all about timing. Or at least, that’s what the cap­i­tal­ists trying to make book sell­ing into a prof­itable market would have you believe.  Now that Prez W has led Amer­ica into de facto social­ism, it may come as some sur­prise that enter­pris­ing pub­lish­ers are still trying to put free-​market voodoo into prac­tice by using busi­ness horse sense and ever-​churning pub­lic­ity machines to sell books–about socialism.

Ezra Klein points to the release of a new Japan­ese manga comic of Marx’s Das Kap­i­tal as a water­shed moment in the edu­ca­tion of a future gen­er­a­tion of Marx­ist socialists.  Make it palat­able, make it fun.  Make it cool.  A spoon­ful of manga makes the social theory go down—forilla.

But this is not new, per se…how could we forget Rius?

Eduardo del Rio, a.k.a. Rius, is a Mex­i­can polit­i­cal car­toon­ist who was bitten with the task of send­ing up the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment in the 1960s, which he did bless­edly well with a strip titled Los Super­ma­chos.

Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber quotes this self-​description by the soci­ol­o­gist Charles Tilly, who died this morning:

Among Tilly’s neg­a­tive dis­tinc­tions he prizes 1) never having held office in a pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tion, 2) never having chaired a uni­ver­sity depart­ment or served as a dean, 3) never having been an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor, 4) rejec­tion every single time he has been screened as a prospec­tive juror. He had also hoped never to pub­lish a book with a sub­ti­tle, but sub­ti­tles some­how slipped into two of his co-​authored books.

I believe this is what hap­pens when the Stan­ford Band infil­trates the Devel­op­ment Office:

Click here for more.

Of the sev­eral things this poster leaves one to wonder at—like the fact that there’s a union for col­lege stu­dents in France, or the kind of argu­ment it deploys—perhaps the most amaz­ing is that it worked: on Feb. 15 it was announced that 620 mil­lion euros were being set aside for new col­lege housing.