Busy times, but I'm here with the crucial information for you.  Or at least the interesting information.

Carol Graham offering an overview of the literature on “deaths of despair” among less educated white men.

Happiness found in the ordinary: a nice reflection and happiness by a novelist. He emphasizes the small scale as the right arena for us with happiness, especially as one grows older, and the joy of finding happiness in immediate obligations, such as the tending of a garden.

Here's a report about efforts to construct a viable metric for measuring a country's progress in meeting the UN's "Sustainable Development Goals". This is interesting in itself, for what it purports to be about, and for how it shows us how deeply "metric-ized" and quantified, and flat-out nosy, our public social scientific discourse has become.  Not that any of those are, necessarily, bad things.  

Daniel Drezner has published his latest list for the best writing on political-economy for 2019, and it's full of interesting pieces.  

The woman who discovered the second half of Twain's manuscript of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn died over the holidays.   

This is a lovely piece on a long-term project to secure the manuscript heritage of Christianity and other religious traditions. The monk who is writing this speaks out of a 1500-year-old tradition. It is worth your while.