Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; thats what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis.

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.