In one of his Blackford Oakes novels, William F. Buckley, Jr. had a character crack a Wagnerian joke along these lines: What is Siegfried? Siegfried is the opera that begins at 7 p.m. and when you wake up three hours later, you’re shocked to find out that it’s only 7:30.

On May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II had lunch in the papal apartment with Dr. Jerome Lejeune, the renowned French pediatrician and geneticist who identified the chromosomal abnormality that causes Down Syndrome.

About two-thirds of the way through that fine 1992 film, A League of Their Own, star catcher Dottie Hinson has had enough of the grind and is ready to quit.

Four and a half months after Russia invaded Ukraine on the Orwellian pretext of displacing a “Nazi” regime — a regime that enjoys a democratic legitimacy absent from Russia for two decades — what have we learned about, and from, the Russian way of war?

Prior to June 24, the U.S. Supreme Court’s most important civil rights decision was handed down on May 17, 1954. Then, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Court declared racially segregated public facilities unconstitutional, effectively reversing its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld state-mandated segregation laws.

Pope Francis’s recent announcement that he will create 21 new cardinals on August 27, 16 of whom would vote in a conclave held after that date, set off the usual flurry of speculations about the shape of the next papal election. Much of that crystal ball-gazing was less than useful, based as it was on numerous myths about conclaves.

Given the rubbish about Ukraine spewed out by Russian trolls and regurgitated by foolish or ideologically besotted Americans, this year’s annual Summer Reading List will focus on serious books that explain the background, including the religious dimension, of a conflict that will shape Europe’s future — and ours.