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.

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.

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.

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.

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.