But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed.

With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

A single, ordinary person still can make a difference - and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not.