Twenty-five years ago, I was a scrawny, short, flat-footed child with an irrepressible competitive streak. Sports, obviously, were out of the question. But fortunately for me, my school had a program called Academic Games. We’d play six competitive games against other schools on the local, state, and national levels—testing our knowledge of mathematics, logic, language, history, rhetoric, and current events.

As a writer who presumes to comment on what is happening in the world today, I’m embarrassed to admit that “World Card” (the current events game) was hardly my best. But I think it was entrapment: To prepare for that game, we were issued copies of The World Almanac, a thousand-page trove of all manner of information. Tasked with reading up on what happened over the past 12 months, my 13-year-old self would, instead, wander aimlessly through the amazing pages of this tome, which seemed to have an answer for any question that popped into my head. When Game Day finally arrived, I was ready to tell you the circumference of the moon but had forgotten who had the top-selling pop single of 1992.