Americans, like a majority of people on the planet, now walk around with the equivalent of the Library of Congress and an old-school, room-sized supercomputer in our back pockets. An inquiry that once involved perusing the annual publication listing all published magazine articles (remember that?) or scanning miles of microfilm, or even just picking up an encyclopedia … now merely requires us to ask Siri.

And so this, the present age is revealing the real obstacle to human progress: not the absence of sufficient information, but our own, profound lack of curiosity and/or common sense.