Arts & Culture

Historian Noah Andre Trudeau is known for uncovering secrets of the Civil War. His previous books, Bloody Roads South and Gettysburg, have unveiled information about Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's march to the sea in 1864, and the legacy of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Now, in preparation for a book about a largely unexamined period of President Abraham Lincoln's life, Trudeau is in search of witnesses.

The afflicted party starts to grieve without warning, compelled by unseen forces to pause mid-stride and remember an entire life's worth of regret, lost love and missed opportunity. Then, once the tears are gone, the ability to smell exits with them.

Grieving is a series of a million heartbreaks. Every morning, you wake, temporarily freed of the memory of what you've lost, only to have the memory rush in and crush you all over again. Mourning meddles with sleep and thought; it makes an hour feel like a month, and a year seem like a lifetime. Most people survive it, but not without a sense of lost time — and that they have lost something of themselves along the way.

Now that Facebook has filed to go public, there's a lot of reflection on how the social media site became the mammoth it is today. The site has gone through a lot of changes in its eight years. Remember when you had to have a college email address to join? Remember when you had to type "thefacebook.com"?

With the Super Bowl looming, three questions are buzzing around America: Who are you pulling for; who's singing at halftime; and where are you watching the game? And if you're hosting a party, you're also asking yourself: What am I going to feed these people?

So it's a good time to highlight a basic lesson of hosting: Nothing classes up a party — even one that's focused on watching football on TV — like good cheese.