Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood i….

We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed..

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

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, determinat….

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

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

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father w….

Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong..

You can be strong as any boy if you'll work hard and train yourself in athletics, the way boys do..

History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else..

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

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an arg….

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesnt enter into it..

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; thats what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is wri….

When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood NOT as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship,….

Why do beautiful women love ugly men?.

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

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the futu….

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 Con….

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories arent often deadly, but they can b….

Disrupt, and you will be saved..