Christmas Specials

AN ENGINEERING MYSTERY

These Japanese treasures look ready to topple at the first tremor, yet they stand firm when all collapses around them. What’s the trick?

Tobacco is not, properly speaking, a social problem at all, but the growing anti-smoking movement is quickly becoming one

FUN WITH FUNGI

LOST HORIZONS IN RUSSIA

When you can find an odder spot on the globe than Kalmykia, let us know. Herein, a potted history of a peculiar place (and we are not making this up)

MODERN VERSE

To be a versifier was once a great thing. Now it is faintly ridiculous. But the people may yet rescue poetry from the pedants

Forecasters of scarcity and doom are not only invariably wrong, they think that being wrong proves them right

FOREIGN POLICY

When the cold war ended in 1989, so did the balance-of-power system in Europe, and a centuries-old way of looking at the world. Here is a new one

PLANNED CITIES

For an object lesson in the perils of central planning, look no further than what happens when governments plan their own capitals

COCA-COLA MAP

LAUGHING MATTERS

To understand a country, you can study its economic data and demographic statistics. Or you can collect its jokes