The best kind of knowledge is uncommon knowledge.
Okay, so maybe you know all the stuff you're supposed to know--that there are teenier things than atoms, that "Remembrance of Things Past" has something to do with a perfumed cookie, that the Monroe Doctrine means we get to take over small South [...]
In the 1890s, young cocksure Theodore Roosevelt, years before the White House, was appointed police commissioner of corrupt, pleasure-loving New York, then teeming with 40,000 prostitutes, illegal casinos and all-night dance halls. The Harvard-educated Roosevelt, with a reformer's zeal, tried to wip[...]