Today is the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. It was one of those days that I will always remember exactly where I was. It was a Tuesday after lunch, and I was a freshman in college on the first day of the spring semester. I was waiting for Psychology 101 to start, and a kid ran in the classroom and announced what had just happened. We were stunned. We were all following this one because of Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space. We left class and went upstairs to watch the TV in the dorm's common area.

Constant media wasn't the vogue of the day. If you didn't have cable, you had to wait for the networks to break in during their regular day-time programming. This was one of the first events that Americans watched live, and it was the beginning of an era of all-news, all the time.