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For an image of the world to come, look to the children: Recently Justin Bieber, the Western world’s choirboy igni ferroque, released his first Christmas album, combining traditional carols—“Drummer Boy,” “Silent Night,” and the like, performed in his signature reedy contralto—with some festive canticles not previously loosed upon the Earth. (From one track: “I don’t want to miss out on the holiday/ But I can’t stop staring at your face.”) Bieber has said that his goal in recording this music, which has already hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, was to “work with people who had great experiences with Christmas albums.” This may strike some listeners as a quixotic ambition. Christmas carols are, if anything, the visiting relatives of the musical world: They show up at the same time every year, stick around a little longer than one might prefer, and set the tone of virtually all family entertainment while they are in town. A December without them would be strange and slightly lonely, yet the prospect of their absence tends to be, by one week in, a reason in itself to look forward to the new year.

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Secret Service agents searched the home of alleged child molester and Syracuse University assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine on Friday. The agents worked alongside local and state police, and appear to be playing a significant role in the investigation. What does the Secret Service have to do with a child molestation case?

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Imagine you walked into a bank, applied for a personal line of credit, and filled out all the paperwork claiming to have no debts and an income of $200,000 per year. The bank, based on these representations, extended you the line of credit. Then, three years later, after fighting disclosure all the way, you were forced by a court to tell the truth: At the time you made the statements to the bank, you actually were unemployed, you had a $1 million mortgage on your house on which you had failed to make payments for six months, and you hadn’t paid even the minimum on your credit-card bills for three months. Do you think the bank would just say: Never mind, don’t worry about it? Of course not. Whether or not you had paid back the personal line of credit, three FBI agents would be at your door within hours.

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Up on a big screen in an underground mall in Beijing, Captain America is throttling the Red Skull, and I’m falling out of my seat. I mean that literally: My seat tilts left and right, forward and back, and I’m white-knuckling my armrests to keep from being toppled into the hydraulics. Who knew the future of filmgoing would call for seatbelts? Though prompted by an assaultive “4-D Experience”—think William Castle meets Space Mountain—this feeling of whiplash is pretty common in a country that’s lurching forward at hyperspeed.

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If you think that political leaders can’t link arms and get things done, you haven’t been watching the aftermath of the supercommittee. Sure, the 12-member team of rivals never came up with a deficit-shrinking plan. Its existence cheapened the prefix “super” more than anything since Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. But when the Gang of 12 died, the six Republicans who killed it formed a new pact: They would tell the history of the superfailure and the debt crisis the way it should be remembered. Oh, that embarrassing slapstick collapse? It was the other side’s fault.

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The severity of the ongoing economic crisis in the Eurozone is perhaps best brought home by a striking statement made Monday by conservative Polish politician Radek Sikorski. "I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say this," he said, "but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear its inactivity."

Poland is not in the Eurozone, but it’s easy to see why Polish officials are panicking. Exports to the Eurozone members constitute more than 10 percent of Polish GDP, so a recession there would almost certainly spill over to Poland.

Should Americans share this fear? A similar analysis for the United States suggests we have much less to worry about. Our exports to the Eurozone are closer to 1.3 percent of GDP. That’s not nothing, but it’s a pretty small piece of the economic pie. It suggests that the economy has less to fear from reduced exports to a careening Europe than it does from the looming expiration of the Bush income tax cuts and the Obama payroll tax cuts.

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In the autumn of 1932, a British inventor named Harry May invited some friends over to see a demonstration of his latest invention, a robot called Alpha that could fire a gun at a target. Operated by wireless control, the robot sat lifeless in a chair on one side of the room. May placed a firearm in the robot’s hand and made his way to the other side of the room to set up a target. With the inventor’s back turned, the two-ton Alpha slowly rose to his feet and pointed the gun with his metallic arm. The men shouted warnings while the women screamed in terror. The inventor turned and was startled to see that his robot had come to life—and was now pointing a gun directly at him. Alpha lunged forward.

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Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 167 with Stephen Metcalf, Deborah Needleman, John Swansburg, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below or opening this player in another tab:

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A compliment among jazz musicians, delivered after a killer solo, is “You were really going somewhere.” That kind of improvised performance, at its best, is not just a stack of impressive phrases or a show of virtuosity: It makes a shape in time, purposeful from beginning to destination. It discovers and reveals a feeling.

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For those of you keeping score at home, Herman Cain now faces a fifth sexual accuser. This time, happily, the alleged misconduct was consensual. Ginger White, an Atlanta businesswoman, says she and Cain had an on-and-off affair for the last 13 years. Cain denies it. Yesterday on CNN, Cain said the three women who previously accused him of sexual harassment “weren’t able to come up with any documentation, any proof.” He said his family “should not be subjected to false accusations that cannot be proved.” As for White, he shrugged, “I have no idea what it is that she’s going to have to show proof.”

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