When I was a kid, I used to deliver the newspaper all over town, cramming papers between screen doors and into mailboxes and under doormats.

If you know a lot about something and apply that information to a vote that matches your policy preferences, your opinion quality is high.

As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid.

In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps - college students and new graduates - to do what little was left of the work of the employees they'd laid off.

Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God's favor, corruption.

The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.

No nation has a single history, no people a single song.

Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart.

When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.

Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.

The Olympics is an imperfect interregnum, the parade of nations a fantasy about a peace never won. It offers little relief from strife and no harbor from terror.

I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.

My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.

Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. You can sell a lot of junk to a lot of people by inventing a stage of life and giving it a name.

The Karen Ann Quinlan case is where the right to life and the right to die got bound together, and I don't think they've ever gotten untangled.

Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.

My mother liked to command me to do things I found scary. I always wanted to stay home and read. My mother only ever wanted me to get away.

Clarence Darrow, America's best-known trial lawyer, was also one of American history's most skilled orators.

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

Americans, among the marryingest people in the world, are also the divorcingest.

Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements.

Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies.

Historians once assumed that when childhood mortality was high, people must not have loved their children very much; it would have been too painful. Research has since proved that assumption wrong.

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

The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press - their plots and tropes - date to the nineteen-twenties, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born.

The idea that debt is necessary for trade, and has to be forgiven, is consequent to the rise of a market economy. The idea that debt is wrong and should be punished is a feature of a moral economy.

Americans like to get rich fast. That this means we go broke fast, too, is something that we have become very good at forgetting. Our ignorance of history is matched only by our unfailing optimism; it's actually part of our optimism.