Leah Hager Cohen

The truth beyond the fetish's glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made.

Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries were determined by the scant information provided by a handful of surviving documents, seemed the greater disservice. I paid homage with my imagination, and hoped I might get visitors to do the same.

There is nowhere morning does not go.

In England, coffeehouses were dubbed penny-universities, because for the admission price of one cent, a person could sit and be edified all day long by scholars, merchants, travelers, community leaders, gossips, and poets.

Increasing pressure on students to subject themselves to ever more tests, whittling themselves down to rows and rows of tight black integers upon a transcript, all ready to goose-step straight into a computer.

Our civic life is heavily marked__ndeed, pocked__y debates in which each side is so certain of its position that any movement is effectively impossible. For that matter, debate__n its original sense of __o consider something, to deliberate___s impossible. We wind up with so much sound and fury and nothing gained.

That our intuition could lead us astray is troubling in direct proportion to the degree of trust we place in it. The solution would seem to be: Don__ be overly trusting. Mix in a healthy dose of skepticism. But suppose we don__ have a say in the matter? Suppose we__e hardwired to trust__o believe in__ur instincts, regardless of whether they__e right? Suddenly the problem of not knowing becomes a lot more complicated.

The ignorance we__e ignorant of is the ignorance most difficult to remedy.