This week’s New Yorker has a piece by Anthony Lane trying to determine what the amorphous EU really is and what it is supposed to be regulating. After examining some of the new laws and regulations recently passed, it concludes with:

The history of European civilization has been rife with attrition and dispute, but the age of conflict is over. Americans do not want to tour a landscape littered with exhausted sex toys. They do not want to bandage the broken heads of circus performers. They want to walk the streets without fear of yogurt; they want to consume bananas of enormous and unenbarrassed girth; above all, they want to sit and watch contented pigs toss a Frisbee from sty to sty. Is that really too much to ask?

No, not really. So keep it up, EU! And quit your whining, UK!