When the market started to crash, the ticker, reliable source of up-to-the-second information, fell behind, and all of a sudden not knowing what you didn't know was worse than knowing, and the spiral went down and down from there

Two Thanksgivings! Twice the turkey, twice the parades, twice the football? Nope, but for a few years the nation was split by a presidential proclamation that didn't quite work as intended

How do you read words that aren't there? The towering idea of the Declaration of Independence, the passage on slavery deleted before its adoption, and the hole that silence has left behind

Encyclopedias have changed, due to the one you know - but actually the one you probably don't, and the ways in which we know the things we know are changing right along with them

The Richter Scale...isn't used any more, and the man who created it had a mind more sensitive to the movements of the earth than the subtleties of society

Hungry yet? The cookbook, and the woman, who standardized recipes and encouraged us all to think about food as science and art

Name after name, row after row, the wall, and the things we bring to it, including ourselves, all of which help us remember and reconcile

How to know when to believe a research study, drawing the line between real and spurious, and how a "random" line in a book defines the way we understand the world

Bishop James Ussher, the search for the beginning of the universe, and the date (and time) of Creation, making the most of the tools at hand

One of the greatest legacies, and worst-written wills of all times, though almost completely not what the author had in mind; wills, their history and how to (almost always) get the last word