Livia Gershon

As we shop for presents this holiday season, most of us would probably agree that a good gift should be something useful to the receiver. But, the historian Ellen Litwicki writes, a little over a century ago, that was a new assumption. Litwicki notes that a typical late-nineteenth-century etiquette manual recommended that wedding gifts should consist of “objets d’art and delightful bric-a-brac.” The only exception was for people very close to the bride and groom “who have a right to comprehend the needs of the newly wedded” and could therefore give them something that they actually needed.

With so many young women succeeding academically, education is becoming feminized, and boys are left out. Or at least, that’s the familiar complaint today, perhaps best known from Hanna Rosin’s 2010 article for The Atlantic, “The End of Men.” The thing is, this phenomenon goes back at least 150 years, as the education historian David Tyack and political scientist Elisabeth Hansot explain in the journal Educational Researcher.

Each year has its own fad: the hoverboard, the pet rock, the…X-ray? As the Victorian studies scholar Sylvia Pamboukian writes, for one brief moment at the end of the nineteenth century, X-rays were all the rage.

The aging of the US population is one of the big, quiet stories of the coming decades. By 2040, the US Census projects that the number of Americans 85 or older will more than double to 14.6 million, while the 65+ population will rise nearly 60 percent to 82.3 million.

There’s no question: Shorter workweeks are good for employees. People who work fewer hours are physically healthier, less prone to depression and heavy drinking, and better at mental and social tasks. One recent study found that most people’s brains function best working about 25 hours a week.

Global policymakers are starting to take happiness seriously.

You know what’s wrong with kids these days? They want to “take things easy, to expect big returns on no investment.” This “seems to be natural to many a parent; but it makes the child flabby, helpless, and a parasite in the community.”