“I want to do something splendid … Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead,” wrote Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women. I read Little Women in 1968; 100 years after it was first published. “A significant emotional event can be the...
Genes are like a bunch of seventh graders; never quite sure how they’re going to rearrange themselves. They’re rarely predictable. And, when they converge, they produce results with lasting consequences. The hereditary line on my mother’s side of the family took...