“…In addition to offering a selection of commentaries (Schimmel 2023;Thornton and Thornton 2023) and book reviews (Louzek 2023;Thakur 2023) of general interest this winter, it is my pleasure to present this year's World Affairs special issue, guest edited by Riccardo Pelizzo and Omer F. Baris. In their special issue entitled "Magic, Rationality, and Politics: The Political Consequences of Traditional Beliefs," the guest editors have compiled and refined a genuinely original and extremely intriguing collection of articles. These will undoubtedly engage World Affairs readers from comparative politics scholars and electoral behavior specialists to those interested in political culture, religion, quantitative analysis, game theory, democratization, development, modernization theory, the contemporary increase in support for extremeright policies, parties, and regimes, secret societies, or the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas!…”