WRITE THE BOOK, MATT!

A column about serendipity during college noting, "Early-career breaks are largely accidental; you’re likelier to be accident-prone if you’re where the action is. An otherwise-wonderful school in the middle of nowhere won’t have the same sorts of accidental opportunities as one in or near a major city." that might be as much about the importance of a core curriculum to help students figure out their strengths and weaknesses as it is about agglomeration economies at large universities includes one of Matt Reed's pet parenthetical asides that might be an advertisement for a survey course about Western Civilization.  "(Someday, somewhere, I’ll get the chance to teach my dream course: Money, Sex and Power: An Introduction to the Social Sciences. If you can’t find anything interesting among those three topics, I really don’t know what to tell you.)"

Well, yes, if you didn't already know it, economics has no boundaries.  I prefer the formulation "sex, death, and why the lines are longest at the roller coaster," but yes, you can probably work either my formulation or his into any of the traditional social sciences.  Well, "relentless combination of mischief and logic" might also work.  But you can't let the Critical Theory types who destroyed English anywhere near such a course.