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Bob Dylan’s Christmas album: Is this a joke — or a tragedy? SEAN WILENTZ explains — he’s official historian-in-residence at the official Bob Dylan website (he also teaches American history at Princeton and is the author of, among other books, Bob Dylan in America.)
WATCH Bob Dylan’s “Must Be Santa” video HERE
Also: it’s the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce of World War I, when, after five months of unparalleled industrial-scale slaughter, British and German soldiers stopped fighting and exchanged gifts of food. Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars, calls it “an outbreak of peace celebrated today with extraordinary fanfare.” WATCH the Sainsbury’s Christmas Truce ad for British TV HERE.
Plus: Why the Puritans banned Christmas: it wasn’t always a festival of domesticity and consumerism. Historian Stephen Nissenbaum explains—his book is The Battle for Christmas.
Hidden in the Senate torture report are stories of some heroes—people inside the CIA who from the beginning said torture was wrong, who tried to stop it, who refused to participate. There were also some outside the CIA, in the military and the FBI, who risked careers and reputations by resisting—and who sometimes paid a heavy price. They should be thanked and honored.
Torture is a crime, a violation of the Federal Torture Act. Those who engaged in the torture documented in such exhaustive detail in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report should be prosecuted, and those who conspired in that torture should also be prosecuted. They include UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo, says Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the Law School at the University of California Irvine.
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Q. In your new book our man Frank Bascombe says he wants to “decommission” certain words and phrases. What’s the idea here? What is on Frank’s list of decommissioned words?
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Also: How a despised immigrant cuisine became a dominant force in American eating: UCI historian 
Plus: Art, sex, and politics in Manhattan in the seventies: The rise of the gay rights movement and the simultaneous rise of photography in the galleries; photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as the partner of Patti Smith and documentarian of the city’s S&M scene; and then Sam Wagstaff as a legendary curator, and patron of Mapplethorpe: 
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Plus: the rise of religious fundamentalism across the world’s religions:
And the first time Harry ever did Nixon on the radio was on KPFK in 1974, when the transcripts of Nixon’s White House tapes were first released and KPFK broadcast a reading of key scenes—with Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, and Harry as Nixon (a decade later they teamed up to do “Spinal Tap”) — and featuring special guest Mama Cass Elliot as Haldeman. We’ve found the tapes of that historic broadcast, and will play excerpts during this hour.
How better to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Watergate than with Harry Shearer, whose “Nixon” has thrilled listeners for decades? And what better cause than the 
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