Average age, in years, of the thirty most frequently played holiday songs : 61 Year when the youngest of these songs, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” was released : 1994…

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Can the earth be saved by bureaucrats in long meetings, reciting jargon and acronyms while surrounded by leaning towers of documents? That is what’s supposed to happen in France this…

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By Justin E. H. Smith, from a work in progress. Smith’s fourth book, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton), will be published in June. At the end of August, the oldest…

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From entries made since 2009 to the U.S. Protocol Gift Unit Federal Register Report, which records items given by foreign dignitaries to federal employees.

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From a list of approximately 70,000 diagnostic codes included in the International Classification of Diseases, Clinical Modification, which was adopted by U.S. health-care providers in October.

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From an audio recording entered as evidence in a 2014 lawsuit filed by a man identified as D.B., who claims that he inadvertently recorded his colonoscopy on his cell phone.…

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From Of Beards and Men, by Christopher Oldstone-Moore, which will be published next month by the University of Chicago Press. Oldstone-Moore is a senior lecturer in history at Wright State…

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From a contract prepared by a casting agency for extras in the television show Westworld, which is scheduled to air on HBO next year.

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By László Krasznahorkai, from Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, a travel memoir that will be published next month by Seagull Books. Krasznahorkai won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize.…

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By Allen Ginsberg (1926–97), from Wait Till I’m Dead, a volume of his uncollected poems that will be published by Grove Atlantic in February.

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The case against a venerable pregnancy treatment

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The Battle of Waterloo turns 200

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Can Bosnia escape the stranglehold of ethnic politics?

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All the way, at odd times, far off, with neither sense nor sequence, the guns have sounded almost like the noises of peace — blasting or pile-driving. Now, outside the…

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Will cave soil save us from drug-resistant superbugs?

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Gambling and suicide in Atlantic City

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Harriet says she will take Gayle to A.A. meetings. Lois offers to pay her extra for gas and time, but Harriet says no, being of service is essential to her…

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The gospel according to Extreme Weight Loss

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In the harsh winter of 1895, Tolstoy wrote a story called “Master and Man,” which tells of a merchant named Brekhunov who, on a day that threatens a blizzard, orders…

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At the beginning of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, the top-secret Impossible Mission Force (I.M.F.) is disbanded after a congressional investigation deems it too reckless. Now Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise)…

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Primo Levi and the enigma of survival

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The double life of John le Carré

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A jaguar named Salman was sent away from the Delhi zoo for being too fat to mate, and a former meerkat expert at the London Zoo was ordered to pay…

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