It’s the 40th anniversary of one of the most tumultuous years in world history: 1968. The year was especially so in the United States, as this video makes clear.

It was also a year of amazing films, as this blog series will detail …

By setting up more walls to the world, as Obama proposes, we risk even higher inflation and GDP contraction along with the possibility of internationalizing our problems.

McCain apparently gets this.

Click here to begin the broadcast.

Information, Please! was one of the most popular, and literate, shows on American radio, airing from 1938-1948 and running briefly as a TV show in the early 1950s. Its format was novel: instead of quizzing contestants from the general public, listeners submitted questions to quiz the experts, and if they stumped the resident eggheads, they won money and (for many years) a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Its master of ceremonies was the warm and witty Clifton Fadiman, literary editor of the New Yorker magazine and a longtime member of Britannica’s Board of Editors.

The Britannica Blog is proud to highlight one of these broadcasts each Friday. So, “Wake Up!”—as the show’s announcer would say at the start of each broadcast. “It’s Time to Stump the Experts!”

Who will win the election if voters decide based on which candidate they expect to do better in handling the issues?

J. Scott Armstrong and I addressed this question in a recent paper. We found that, historically, voters chose the candidate they expected to do the best job in dealing with the issues facing the country. For 2008, our approach predicts Barack Obama as the election winner.

The Biograph HD PET-CT system is a pioneer in employing high-definition technology in medicine, enabling doctors to view images in high resolution. As this video explains, HD allows doctors to perceive molecular changes before they manifest themselves as anatomical abnormalities. Apparent implications include early detection and diagnosis of debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer’s and heart disease.

Of all the tutelary animals known to the peoples of the northern hemisphere, none occupies so central a place in the imagination as the wolf.

Here are a few stories about Canis lupus.

Allan Lichtman—Britannica blogger, author, and professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C.—has been chosen by “the U.S. Speaker and Specialist Program of the Bureau of International Information Programs of the Department of State” to play Obama’s top advisor in a series of debates across Russia over the next two weeks. His opponent, playing the top advisor to John McCain, is Ann Stone, founding director of Republicans for Choice. Their debates begin tomorrow and will take place in Moscow, Ryazan, Yekaterinburg, and Nizhniy Novgorod.

We look forward to hearing soon from Allan about his speechifying abroad.

A great deal has been written about whether the recent ads by the McCain-Palin ticket are “factually accurate,” “highly misleading,” or “just plain lies.” Whoever thought we could have a “calm, respectful general election campaign” “without biased distortions of the other candidate’s record” (I mean you, John McCain!) must have been smoking something at the time.

I miss J.P. Morgan. With his imposing figure, piercing eyes, great walrus moustache, dressed in cutaway and top hat, he was the very image of a “malefactor of great wealth,” in Teddy Roosevelt’s phrase (though he probably didn’t actually intend Morgan).

We don’t have a convenient face to hate these days; or perhaps we have too many.

Saturday Night Live hit a home run this weekend with Tina Fey’s spot-on impersonation of Sarah Palin. But there’s plenty of presidential humor out there this election year, such as this clip from comedian Frank Caliendo. For an equal-time jab at the Democrats, see post below.