Act Your Age Dept.

I'm currently clavicle-deep in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky — full disclosure, I'm a Dostoevsky man, but I won't turn down the Big T at his best — and the sheer amount of social upheaval in the 19th century that served as the background for both authors' works makes the times we live through now seem almost piddling. Well, almost. We only know the times and the manners we have been born into.

And the times and the manners I was born into don't seem any less seismic in their own way. Right now it's a...