Physicists announced this week that they may be closing in on finding the Higgs boson particle. Also known as the God particle, the Higgs boson would be definitive evidence that the universe as we understand it is, well, the universe as we understand it. Scientists assume the Higgs exists because, in theory, it represents the best explanation of why matter has mass—which it must in order for our view of the universe to work.

Information is the currency of democracy, Thomas Jefferson famously said.

And open access to government records is key to obtaining information, a requirement so basic we sometimes take it for granted.

In fact, various state and federal laws, including the Freedom of Information Act, are the tools ordinary citizens and the news media rely on to make sure their right to see public documents is protected. Like any laws, these need to change with the times.

Suspended in that hazy frontier between sleep and awareness, I came awake at 3 a.m., not with the realization that something didn’t smell right, but rather that I am dying. I had been skunked. Inside my apartment, from under the floorboards.

Between rubbing my burning eyes into a bloodshot jelly and struggling to find a breath’s worth of oxygen, I hatched what, at the time, seemed a brilliant plan: I smeared toothpaste in my nostrils and hid under my comforter.

The first time I marched in Washington, D.C., for women’s rights I was in a stroller being pushed down the National Mall. The next time I was 16 years old, in a wheelchair with a broken foot, but still determined to participate in the March for Women’s Lives, the same rally for reproductive rights I had been too young to walk in before.

My sign was made from a piece of discarded cardboard and a ballpoint pen. I carved my message deeply into the board, as if to leave a scar: What’s Next, the 19th Amendment?

I found an old ferry schedule yesterday, in the drawer of a tall china cabinet in the living room where it had been for years. The faded coral-colored picture of the ferry and the darkened print of this little piece of paper came into focus. It had been living, half visible, under a lot of silver spoons, for the past three decades. The Islands, it said. Late Winter 1978. Inside it read Winter Schedule. Effective Jan. 13, 1978. Well, this was the winter of 2012, when after 33 years I decided to look at this small scrap.