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

The world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.

Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

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.

Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats up until the late 1980s.

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

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.