Jonah, I wrote my first book to argue that you are wrong. Though you were only 17 in 1986, The Outside Story was heading for this moment, this e-mail, like a comet.

Ideas matter. Parents’ affiliation is another name for family fealty to ideas. The crooked timbers of humanity–screams, supoermarket scanners, etc., etc.–wash up where they do, in part because of the currents of ideas.

N.B: I never called the ideas I wrote about lower middle upper (sounds like a chiropracter).