ADAM GOPNIK has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986. He is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism and the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, and in March of 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Republic. He lives in New York City with his wife and their two children.
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On a memorable day in human history, February 12, 1809, two babies were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country estate. It was a time of backward-seeming notions, when almost everyone sti... SEE MORE