I'm taking credit for you reading fiction in 2025.

You are living a charmed life.

My whole mental model of you is broken by the absence of the Wellness reporting from this list.

I mean, I see what you are saying.

But I'll be damned if I'm going to hand it to Adorno.

Why?

If I want to discover that I don't really understand what's going on in my proof, I can just try to write the text explaining the result.

Or did you have in mind that I would try and succeed?

I mean, is it really worse than Automatic for the People?

I would be disappointed if you did...

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that all CS majors were 1st gen and all art history majors were from well-connected families.

Even if CS actually provides better job opportunities,we'd observe CS majors having worse job outcomes, despite the causal effect going the opposite direction.

That seems likely to be true.

But my point is, you cannot even tell the sign of the effect, let alone its magnitude, from this sort of evidence.

Just for the record, this difference is definitely not an unbiased estimate of the causal effect of changing from art history to a computer engineering major on unemployment.,

Our producer cut the part where I said that the clearest way of saying what I think is that I think what Ian Hacking says.

You can definitely spray your kid.

So your kid exists.

Come to think of it, there's a genre here:

"I'm a nearly 60 year old columnist for the paper of record and I've just discovered..."

"...Springsteen, and did you know that he's quite an evocative lyricist?"

and

"...Augustine, and did you know that he's really quite spiritually deep?"

I've been trying to come up with a rationalist explanation for your reading a column by Ross Douthat but can only conclude that it was the hand of god.

Two thoughts.

First, I don't like those Updike novels at all.

Second, given where this post ended, Tony Judt's Postwar is magnificent and well worth your time.