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

Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.

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.

My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.

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

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories arent often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.