Tis the season for the travel industry to publish its "best" lists, an annual exercise in stocktaking and kudo-bestowing that can prove as rewarding for the public as it is for publicists.

CNN: ASIANOW - TIME Asia | Travel Watch

Mark Mazower, a British historian at Columbia University, New York, presents his work as a stocktaking: a chance, just as the West is seeing power shift to emerging giants in the East, to ponder how Europeans and Americans crafted the present web of international institutions, from the UN to the World Bank or International Monetary Fund.

ECONOMIST: How world institutions were built