The whole thing reminds me of graduate school seminars, except these people are smart and funny and have something interesting to say. - Sarah Vowell

The thing that drew me to Lafayette as a subject - that he was that rare object of agreement in the ironically named United States - kept me coming back to why that made him unique. Namely, that we the people never agreed on much of anything. Other than a bipartisan consensus on barbecue and Meryl Streep, plus that time in 1942 when everyone from Bing Crosby to Oregonian school children heeded FDR's call to scrounge up rubber for the war effort, disunity is the through line in the national plot - not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington's army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen's pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbor, getting on each other's nerves is our right.

Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children's children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.

The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.