Birth of the Pill and How We Do History

Jonathan wrote this for The New York Times.

We all should embrace and even celebrate history’s messy nature: Question it, debate it, get down in the dirt and wrestle with it. When Ms. Huang asked if I would be a character in her play, I said yes. I said that I had never felt ownership of the story. How could I? History is a conversation, and I never intended to do all the talking. History is also an exercise in failure; the goal is to fail as little as possible, but those of us who write history will always get things wrong and leave things out.