An interesting collection of recent short explainers originally published by The Economist to provide quick facts, figures and explanations on some aspects of the world, some of which may appear contradictory.

The book is divided into several sections, each of which contains explainers for some of the questions raised. The sections range from the very generic questions about the world to more specialized topics like food, economics (of course), science, technology, sports, words and holidays.

I have read quite a number of the explainers when they were originally published by The Economist, so much of the material in the book is already familiar to me. Even so, there are some explainers that I missed that explain some aspects of the world in a new light.

All the explainers are brief, at most only a few pages, with some occasional graphs. But they fulfil the aim of the book, which is to explain some interesting and unusual aspects of why some things in the world are the way they are now.