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

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

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.

In antihistory, time is an illusion.

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

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.