Things Fall Apart: A Transatlantic Odyssey

In recent years I’ve often thought that we, as a society, fail to appreciate how much our high living standard—our safety, creature comforts, and conveniences—are provided by an unseen and unsung army of skilled laborers.

Flip a switch and you have light; turn on a tap and you have clean water; adjust the thermostat and you have heat or AC; depress a lever and you flush the toilet. It wasn’t so long ago—a little over a century—that such conveniences were not available to even kings and emperors....