Weirdly, there have been a lot of critics of conservatism, but very few critics of innovation. As a culture, we are deeply paranoid about politics, but we gaze upon innovation with rapturous adulation.

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

Few American presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson.

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.

The very first television ad targeted to women was produced by the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign in 1956. It includes footage of a woman supervising her children doing their homework at the kitchen table.

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.