The dashed hopes of those times offer a distant mirror on America's current predicament. The "light at the end of the tunnel" turned out to be an oncoming train. A presidential candidate found his winning lane was to deepen divisions, not become a healing agent.  The goal of politics became exclusively to hold power.

“I describe them as having been bad in ways that no human has been bad before. They are boring. They are flat.”

The court’s ruling, which rattled reproductive medicine practitioners across the country and shut down in vitro fertilization (IVF) operations in Alabama, is not only unscientific but absurd.

The idea, practice, and until a year ago, city policy, was to assemble a number of nine-square grids of three by three 400-foot-square blocks, leaving the buildings in place while taking through traffic off the streets and routing it around the blocks.

At the old clarinetist's last house, a backyard boasted an imitation of the Parthenon and the fence around it consisted, in part, of old bedsteads.