Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

• In a new (holiday release?) edition of WormWars (PDF), Miguel, Kremer, and Hicks address some of the critiques made online, as well as the media handling.
• As Chris mentioned, the new episode of Freakonomics Radio focusing on migration, with Clemens, Tabarrok, and many others is very good.
• The Council on Foreign Relations is using data visualizations to help track violence in Nigeria.
• Some interesting long(ish) reads for your holiday down time:
  • The noodle dish Pad Thai was a political outcome of a coup (Priceonomics)
  • The Messy Business of Reinventing Happiness, about how Disney World took a bet shifting to digital tracking of park goers (Fast Company)
  • How Columbus brought syphilis to Europe, and what it teaches us about how disease spreads (Quartz)
• An album made by Malawian prisoners has been nominated for a Grammy.
• Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time, and a new paper supports it, finding important new ideas by outsiders spike after a superstar scientist dies. Paper here, Vox article here.

And some alarming new rankings data from Clickhole:

Top image via Flickr/Ne