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It's pilot season, that time of year when television networks create and test new shows with hopes of turning out the next big thing. But whatever new plots they come up with, it's safe to say that they will turn to the safety of a limited number of character archetypes: the lovable loser, the charming rogue, the desperate housewife.

New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum would like to add one more character to that long, familiar list: the hummingbird. She writes that hummingbirds are "idealistic feminine dreamers whose personalities are irritants. They are not merely spunky but downright obsessive."

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Claire Danes: Playing Bipolar Is Serious Business

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers are battling a bid by Amazon to claim new Internet domains such as ".book," ".author" and ".read." In complaints filed late last week to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the two groups call Amazon's concept "plainly anticompetitive" and "not in the public interest." Barnes & Noble also isn't happy about it.

Mindy Kaling is writing a follow-up to her 2012 book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). Kaling, your cool big sister and the star of The Mindy Project, announced her plans last week to a crowd at a TV festival.

"Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own," writes Francine Prose in an essay about literary dreams for The New York Review of Books.

Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of Germanic languages, writes about the idea of the "female trickster" for The New Yorker: "Lady Gaga draws us out of our comfort zones, crosses boundaries, gets snared in her own devices. Shamelessly exploitative and exploratory, she reminds us that every culture requires a space for the disruptive energy of antisocial characters. She may have the creativity of a trickster, but she is also Sleeping Beauty and menacing monster, all rolled into one."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

Scottish novelist A. L. Kennedy's Blue Book is the weird and lovely story of a chance meeting of former con artist partners aboard a trans-Atlantic cruise. And don't miss Kennedy's essay for NPR on Derek Raymond's crime novel He Died With His Eyes Open. She writes: "Derek Raymond, who died in 1994, has been described as the father of British noir. But he's far beyond noir. There probably isn't even a word for his kind of darkness."

The protagonist of William H. Gass' long-awaited Middle C, Joseph Skizzen, has a rich imaginary inner life as the founder of the mysterious Inhumanity Museum.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which came out Monday, has generated an extraordinary amount of debate. NPR's Renee Montagne calls the book "something of a feminist call to arms." But others say Sandberg's view is too narrow — Melissa Gira Grant wrote in The Washington Post that "this is simply the elite leading the slightly-less-elite, for the sake of Sandberg's bottom line."

Although he's been a public figure for three decades, the Rev. Al Sharpton is more visible these days than ever, often in ways even he wouldn't have dreamed when he was leading protests on the streets of New York in the 1980s.

If you watched the inauguration ceremony for President Barack Obama, you probably saw the dais behind him filled with the usual lot of past presidents, members of Congress and so on. You also may have caught sight of a new, and improbable, addition: Sharpton.

His exclusive seating among America's top dignitaries was a first for the controversial civil rights leader, whose career has been a thorn in the side of many politicians.

Sharpton recently told NPR: "I've had worse inaugurations. I remember George [W.] Bush's [2001] inauguration; we were marching because we thought he stole the election."

As reported on NPR's Tell Me More, it's a turnabout that comes just after the 25th anniversary of the Tawana Brawley rape case, the alleged hoax in New York that made Sharpton perhaps the most racially polarizing figure in the nation for a time.

Since then, the outsider gradually has become the consummate insider.

Once considered by many elected officials to be political kryptonite, Sharpton, 58, now has the ear of a sitting president. Once fiercely combative with the news media, Sharpton now is a prominent part of it as host of both a nationally syndicated talk-radio show, Keepin' It Real, and the MSNBC nightly program PoliticsNation.

Perhaps just as unlikely, MSNBC says that after 15 months, PoliticsNation has the largest audience in the 6 p.m. hour in the cable network's history. In addition, the show ranked second behind Fox's programming in both total viewers and the coveted 25-to-54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet.

A Day In The Life Of Al Sharpton

It's not required, but it's almost surely going to happen:

The man chosen to be the next pope will choose a new name — one other than what he was born with.

So, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was born Karol Jozef Wojtyla. And so on back through history.

How far back? That's one of the 5 things we'll try to explain.

1. Who started this tradition? The Kansas City Star reports in a story headlined "What's In A Name? A Lot If You're A Pope," that it apparently began with "Mercurius, named for the god Mercury," who in 533 changed his name to John II. "A pope named after a pagan god — that wasn't going to go over, PR-wise," Biagio Mazza, a church educator and historian in Kansas City, tells the Star.

John II set a precedent: Almost all popes since have chosen a name that honors a saint or a previous pope (or both).

Many are thought to have been sending some sort of message. Pope John Paul I, as CTV News reports, chose "a composite of the names of two previous popes, John and Paul, who had guided the church through the tumultuous Second Vatican Council (known as Vatican II) in the 1960s. Many consider it to be one of the most important — and controversial — periods in the church's history, as leaders attempted to modernize relations between the church and the secular world." The new (and short-lived) pope "wanted to show he was not going to deviate from their path and would be faithful to what they had done," William Portier, chair of Catholic theology at the University of Dayton, tells CTV.

2. When did a pope last choose not to change his name? That's a bit of a judgment call. The Clerical Whispers blog writes that "the last pope to use his baptismal name was Marcellus II in 1555." As the 2008 book Popes and the Tale of Their Names notes, "his birth name was Marcello Cervini degli Spannochi." So, Marcellus was really just a variation of Marcello.

3. Whose name has been "retired." St. Peter was the first pope and there hasn't been a Pope Peter since. He has "a unique and sacrosanct standing as a pope," as Popes and the Tale of Their Names puts it, and his followers have not wished to look as if they're comparing themselves to him.

4. Which name has been the most popular? John is the leader and may never be topped. Pope John XXIII, who died in 1963, was the most recent (if you include the two John Pauls, of course, you could argue that there have been 25). Tied at No. 2: Benedict and Gregory. Those names have each been used 16 (XVI) times.

5. What Names Are Still Waiting To Be Reused? St. Linus was the second pope, and there hasn't been another Linus since, as NewAdvent.org's list shows. And there are many others from the church's first 350 years or so that haven't seen their names reused — including St. Hyginus, St. Zephyrinus and St. Dionysius.

But Pope Lando (913-14) deserves a special mention. He appears to be the last pope with a name that was completely unique (though John Paul I also deserves a nod because he decided to add the "I" himself; no other pope, it seems, has declared himself to be a "first").

Since Lando's short time leading the church, of which not much is known, there hasn't been another Pope Lando.

Before we finish, we'll say this before someone else does: Lando does have one semi-famous namesake, of course, from the Star Wars movies.

Update at 3:30 p.m. ET. Leo Is The Betting Favorite:

The Irish online betting site Paddy Power does give odds on what name the next pope will choose. Right now, Leo is the 11/10 favorite. There have been 13 other Leos, so far.