Choosing our 10 Best Books of the Year was not an arbitrary process, but neither was it a scientific one. How could it be, when the editors here, like all readers, respond subjectively to any work of fiction or nonfiction? The one guideline for the 10 was that they had to have been reviewed in our pages sometime in the past 12 months...

But in the eyes of many environmentalists, Freshley could have made a better choice than buying that artificial tree last year at a Costco near her home in Gaithersburg. Even tree huggers are encouraging Americans to go out every December and buy a real tree from a lot or go to a farm, cut one down, and drag it home because tree farms are good for the atmosphere...

These notes and doodles, handwritten by Newt Gingrich, appear in a series of exhibits appended to a report published on Jan. 17, 1997 by the House Select Committee on Ethics. The notes are mainly from the period leading up to his big 1994 victory. The text at left reads:

Gingrich—Primary Mission

—Advocate of civilization

—definer of civilization

—Teacher of the rules of civilization

—arouser of those who form civilization

—Organizer of the pro-civilization activists

—leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces...

Can a video game change the world? At the "Minecraft" convention in Las Vegas, crazily costumed obsessives say yes...

And then Moses spoke: "Let my people go."

Not that Moses. This would be David Moses. Captain, U.S. Army.

Moses' people — a rapidly shrinking U.S. military force — are pouring daily through this base in Iraq's southern desert on their way out of the country. It is Moses' mission to keep the floor of troops and equipment flowing south to Kuwait, retracing the route thousands of U.S. troops and their armor took when they entered Iraq more than eight years ago...

President Obama has decided that he is more likely to win if the election is about big things rather than small ones. He hopes to turn the 2012 campaign from a plebiscite about the current state of the economy into a referendum about the broader progressive tradition that made us a middle-class nation. For the second time, he intends to stake his fate on a battle for the future...

I am a product of World War II, an early baby boomer. My father was wounded on Okinawa, and I was always aware of his status as a veteran of the war. The war certainly played a role in shaping me...

Forty-one remarkable photographs of the attack and its immediate aftermath, with detailed captions...

Miyahara feels passionately about stimulating and rejuvenating the J-pop scene. "What we in Japan need to be is more assertive on the world stage," he says. "We have Toyota, we have Sony. We have sushi and tempura, and we even have anime. We don't really have music yet, and that's in my sights. We need to overcome these difficult times in the (Japanese) music industry right now."...

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the "habitable zone" around a star not unlike our own...