Eulogy for the CIA Factbook: The free standard for world facts, long an educational staple, is gone
If you attended school any time after the Nixon administration, then you likely beheld at some point the CIA World Factbook, a map and reference manual of Planet Earth and its inhabitants upon which nearly everyone could agree. Maybe you read parts of it from a floppy disk or a CD-ROM for that social studies project due tomorrow. Or scanned its list of countries for Latvia, because that is the country you are representing next week in Model U.N. Even better, you wandered the earth in your imagination as you held the physical Factbook in your own hands, unfolding its maps and ...
