The product was a pain reliever made by one of the most trusted companies in America. Months earlier, at a plant in Puerto Rico, two lots of it had failed a laboratory test: the caplets might not dissolve properly, which means, in the plainest reading, the medicine might not work. Nobody had been hurt. Nothing had been reported. And the company had told the government it would get the product back. It just never used the word recall. It called the program a purchase project. The word recall was the thing being avoided, because a recall is public, and public is expensive. The whole thing came apart because of a piece of paper.

I want to tell you about a winter in 1868. In Concord, Massachusetts, a thirty-five-year-old woman named Louisa May Alcott sat at a desk her father had built and wrote a novel for money, because the family needed the money. She wrote it fast, about ten weeks, and she wrote about four sisters who were her own sisters. She did not expect much from it. The first printing vanished. The presses ran all fall. Then the letters started. Thousands of letters, from girls all over the country, and every letter asked the same question. Who does Jo marry? Alcott put her answer in her journal, and it is the funniest and angriest sentence in American publishing.