The key to fixing education is better teaching, and the key to better teaching is figuring out who can teach and who can't.

If Franz Kafka were alive today he'd be writing about customer service.

By laying the groundwork for a system centered on home ownership rather than the public housing popular in Europe, the New Deal made possible the great postwar housing boom that populated the Sun Belt and boosted millions of Americans into the middle class, where, ironically, they often became Republicans.

The basic problem is with the business model of journalism. That business model is premised on the idea that talk is cheap and reporting is expensive.

The only reason the House hasn't done even more damage is that the Senate often sands down the most noxious ideas, making the bills merely bad, not disastrous.

Almost no one under 60 remembers what fundraising was like before Watergate. Until the 1970s, campaign money was collected by "bagmen," familiar characters from the world of organized crime. As fans of Boardwalk Empire know, a bagman is a political fixer who walked around with stacks of $100 and $1,000 bills. At lower levels, he used brown paper bags. In presidential campaigns, the cash was more likely to be in briefcases. Classier that way.

Millions of Americans would still despair in the eight long years of the Depression that lay ahead and many of their individual dreams would be dashed on the rocks of economic hardship. But collectively, the country was in a new place, with a new confidence that the federal government would actively try to solve problems rather than fiddle or cater to the rich. Hope was no longer for Pollyannas; the cynics about the American system were in retreat.