Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

by Michael Lewis

When he was 5, he asked his mother, how come the rest of the world goes to church and we don’t? “She said, ‘Well, they’re wrong and we’re right.’

“I have a very fine nose for elitism,” said Chris. “And it bothers me. And I was in Princeton. There’s a kind of idea at a place like that: ‘We’re the smartest and you should just shut up and let us run the world.’ And this just really bugs me.”

The impulse to collect data preceded the ability to make sense of it. People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure. But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.

The point of the roof bolt story was that, left to itself, the free market would fail to protect ordinary workers—even when it clearly had the wherewithal to do so.

And yet even now his father hovered in the background both as a rhyme and a presence.

he believes the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., which are etched into stone just below the IRS building’s pediment: “Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.”

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“A leader is best when the people hardly know he exists. And of that leader, the people will say when his work is done, ‘We did this ourselves.’ ”

“the National Archives does not consider biological specimens to be federal records, and as such we generally do not intentionally accession deceased insects.”

Many History Hub searches are straightforward requests for military personnel records or family papers.

Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,”

you cannot trust Americans to take only their slice of the American Dream. Many Americans want the whole dream, and then they want to sell it back to the rest of us at an extremely marked-up price. You know how angry you get at the price of a bottle of water at the airport? What if the whole country were the airport?