Selected Essays | Ellen Wayland-Smith on Siddhartha Mukherjee

On this episode of the podcast, Jess and Zach return to Selected Essays to talk to Ellen Wayland-Smith about Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “My Father’s Body, at Rest and in Motion,” published in the New Yorker in 2018.

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Transcript

Jessica Swoboda  00:06

Hey everyone, welcome to Selected Essays, a podcast series from the point magazine about essays you should read but probably haven't. Each episode, we'll be talking with writers about an essay that's influenced one of their own. My name is Jess Swoboda, and I'm here with my co-host, Zach Fine. 

Zach Fine  00:23

This week, we spoke to Ellen Wayland-Smith, a professor of writing at the University of Southern California. Ellen is the author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table, The Angel in the Marketplace and The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and Boundaries of the Self, which was published last year. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Orion, Guernica, the Millions, Aeon magazine and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. We spoke with Ellen about Siddhartha Mukherjee's 2018 essay, “My Father’s Body, At Rest and in Motion,” which was published in the New Yorker. We also spoke with Ellen about her essay “Natural Magic,” which was published in the American Scholar in 2021.

Jessica Swoboda  01:05

We hope you'll enjoy this episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, if you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selected essays at thepointmag.com We'd love to hear from you and also be sure to subscribe to The Point, the magazine that brings you content like this podcast, you can find a 50% off discount code exclusive to listeners in the episode notes.

Zach Fine  01:41

Hey Ellen. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Selected Essays.

Ellen Wayland-Smith  01:44

Hi Zach. Hi Jessica, thank you for having me. 

Zach Fine  01:49

So today we're going to be talking about Siddhartha Mukherjee's essay, “My Father's Body, at Rest and in Motion,” which was published in the New Yorker in 2018. Before we dive into the essay, can you tell us a little bit about Mukherjee as a writer and essayist?

Ellen Wayland-Smith  02:05

Yeah, so I, as a New Yorker reader, had heard of him, but wasn't particularly familiar with his work. And then my own father died in 2016, and I wrote an essay about his death, which I published in 2018, and my sister actually sent a link to this essay, which came out soon after. And I read it first because I had just written one myself about my father's death. But I was just completely taken with it. And, of course, you know, feeling abject about how much better it was than the essay that I had written about my own father's death. In any case, I really just thought it was a beautiful piece that wound together beautifully the personal and the sort of, you know, he roots a personal experience in a broader, sort of scientific and ultimately even sort of philosophical context, which I found very moving and persuasive, as I was just sort of starting out on my own journey to become an essayist. Actually, the first essay I ever wrote was the one about my father dying, which I published in 2018, so I kind of feel like he, what could you was sort of there at the beginning, as I, you know, sort of first began to think I could become an essayist, and I didn't return to him until until much later. But by then, I feel like the lessons of that early essay had sort of sunk subconsciously into my writing.

Jessica Swoboda  03:39

Yeah, can you say more about what this essay is about and why you selected it to discuss today?

Ellen Wayland-Smith  03:44

Yeah. So, I mean, Mukherjee in general, he writes, he does sort of the medicine beat for the New Yorker, but is probably best known for these giant books of popular science that he does. I mean, he himself is an oncologist. So he sort of picks scientific concepts and then embeds them in a rich narrative web of literature and history and his own personal experiences, you know, sort of blends this all together in these books. Probably the most famous one is The Emperor of All Maladies, a biography of cancer, which is a five-hundred-page tome about the history of cancer, again, all sort of woven throughout with his own anecdotal experiences with it. So why I chose this essay, I think, is because when I teach it to my students, which I do now, I give them the Mukherjee essay, and then I also give them Aldous Huxley's preface to his collected essays, which I have found a really useful way to think about the essay form. And so Huxley, in his preface to the collected essays, says that—you know, the essay is this notoriously sort of baggy, difficult to pin down genre. And he divides it. He says, I think the essay is best considered from a three pole frame of reference. And he writes that there are essayists who are primarily personal essayists whose topic is their own, you know, inner being. And they deal in anecdote and description, he says. Then there are what he calls objective essayists, who turn their lens outward and who choose some literary or scientific or political theme that they will discuss and pass judgment on and draw conclusions from. And then the third category of essayist he calls the abstract essayist, those who never condescend to the personal and barely even condescend into concrete facts, he says, so they remain entirely in the sphere sort of abstractions. And his example of one of these essays is Paul Valery, the French poet, essayist who wrote a lot drawing on Descartes and sort of the French philosophical tradition. In any case, he says these are the three kinds of essays that exist out there. But the best, and what he calls the most rich and satisfying essays, are those that can use all three that sort of pivot back and forth easily and nimbly between all three polls. As I teach this to my students, I ask them to sort of go through and see how Mukherjee has, as the spine of the essay, a personal anecdote. To just to give a resume of the essay, it begins when he gets a phone call from his mother saying that his father has suffered a fall. His father has been in declining health for a while, and so he gets on a plane to go to Delhi, where his father is and the story sort of unfolds as he follows his father in basically the process of his death, a series of sort of what he ends up calling a cascade failure. One system fails, and then another system fails. And he eventually ends the essay at his father's side as he dies. But so the spine of the narrative is his own personal chronological story of, you know, getting into the airplane, going to Delhi, dealing with his his father, and eventually putting him to rest. But he also brings in what Huxley might call the objective and the abstract poles, because what he ends up doing is questioning. His initial question is, you know, why was my father's body falling apart? And when he goes and actually sees him in the emergency room where he's been taken once he gets to New Delhi, he realizes the sort of poorly equipped, understaffed hospital room where his father is is barely, sort of hanging by a thread, right? It sort of seems as though it's going to explode in a million directions at the slightest provocation. And he realizes that he's been asking the wrong question. The question is not, why was my father's body breaking down, but what sort of invisible force had been holding it together this time, all of this time, right? And so he begins to think about homeostasis, and as you know, a biological concept of that sort of internal force that keeps living things functioning. And again, from that sort of core example of the homeostasis of a human body, he then expands outwards to any system, right, the system of a hospital emergency room, or the system of a city, or at the largest scale, the system of the planet, and it becomes what I think is a very profound sort of meditation on entropy, more generally, how we're all sort of spiraling towards dissolution eventually, right? And kind of the miracle of what holds things together for the short time that they do hold together. Sorry, that's a long answer. 

Zach Fine  09:04

No, no, that's wonderful. Could you read the opening? So we can get a sense of how the essay begins.

Ellen Wayland-Smith  09:14

The call came at three in the morning. My mother, in New Delhi, was in tears. My father, she said, had fallen again, and he was speaking nonsense. She turned the handset toward him. He was muttering a slow, meaningless string of words in an unrecognizable high-pitched nasal tone. He kept repeating his nickname, Shibu, and the name of his childhood village, Dehergoti. He sounded as if he were reading his own last rites.

"Take him to the hospital," I urged her, from New York. "I'll catch the next flight home."

"No no, just wait," my mother said. "He might get better on his own." In her day, buying an international ticket on short notice was an unforgivable act of extravagance, reserved for transcontinental gangsters and film stars. No one that she knew had arrived “early” for a parent’s death. The frugality of her generation had congealed into frank superstition: if I caught a flight now, I might dare the disaster into being.

"Just sleep on it," she said, her anxiety mounting, I put the phone down and e-mailed my travel agent, asking her to put me on the next available Air India flight.

Zach Fine  10:20

That's great. Thank you. So why do you think Mukherjee starts here with the phone call? There's many different places he could have started the essay. Why here? 

Ellen Wayland-Smith  10:31

Well, that's a good question. I mean, I always thought of it as just sort of the moment when he hears about the fall that once we get into the body of the essay sort of triggers the failure cascade of his father's organ systems, right? That this is the moment that he sort of leaps into action. And, you know, if we, if we look at the essay as narrating a sort of chronological, classic narrative structure of beginning, which begins with a sort of upset of the equilibrium his father is not doing well, and then gets to the sort of apex, or the the climax of the action, which is his father being moved home, and clearly on the sort of downward spiral, and ends with the sort of establishment of new equilibrium, if it can be called that, with his father's death. It just it makes a sort of Aristotelian narrative sense.

Jessica Swoboda  11:28

There are two scenes in this essay that really strike me, and the first one has to do with, we're not in New Delhi, we're back at that clinic that he works at when he's a resident trying to earn some extra cash, and it's when he arrives early for his shift because he made he messed up Daylight Savings Time, and he sees this nurse getting everything ready, and he learns and realizes soon that this woman is basically solely responsible for for the clinic operating and the way that it does and being efficient, it made me think too about, okay, for starters, what kind of labor and work is going on unseen that's helping things run efficiently? And then the second thing is, as well, why do we only cease to recognize something when it doesn't function in the way that we want it to function? And those seem to me to be two kind of poles of this essay in some ways, and I'm wondering what you're seeing as the central kind of themes, or the impulses of this essay as a whole.

Ellen Wayland-Smith  12:32

Yeah, no, I think, I think, I think that's absolutely right, that he is startled when he begins to realize, or, you know that he comes to this sort of epiphany that as long as things are functioning, you don't question them, it's just they sort of go on habitually, and habit sort of inures us to the possibility that it could be disrupted at any moment. And then when they're disrupted, like when his father has the fall, or when he goes to this emergency room, that is really just like one sort of broken gasket away from the whole thing flying apart at the seams. That becomes the moment that makes you, I think, almost retrospectively, appreciate the systems that held together for as long as they did. And he does say at one point in the essay, you know, he's sort of puzzled by this fact that we don't study more how systems hold together. And he suggests, at one point, if we knew what these invisible forces were and how they worked, in other words, to use your language, Jessica, if we could sort of attune ourselves to the labor that happens behind the scenes that we often just choose not to see or don't see, we might learn something about how to keep the systems that we want to keep functioning functioning, or to break the systems that we don't want to function. And so I think it has almost to serve an ethical—he doesn't go into great detail about this, but I think it's an interesting sort of meta-meditation on systemic thinking and how difficult systemic thinking is, because systems happen invisibly, and understanding how they happen and the invisible labor that makes them happen is so important to comprehending them and our place in them.

Jessica Swoboda  14:22

Yeah. Because the other scene that really stuck out to me was when they're trying to move his father into the ambulance, or, I guess he says it's more like a moving van with a slab of wood for him, his father to lay on. And that seemed to be like, Oh, we're he's witnessing firsthand, and being confronted by, like, this failure of a of a system, right?

Ellen Wayland-Smith  14:42

Yeah, right, that he had always been sort of cocooned inside of these relatively well-funded systems in the United States, and this was sort of encounter with a system that wasn't going to function seamlessly or invisibly.

Zach Fine  15:04

Can I ask what you think about Mukherjee himself in this essay? And we could approach it maybe from in the context of the classroom, for instance, when you're teaching this, but as a narrator here, as a writer, he has so much poise, and he's very controlled in his prose. But then there are moments here where, you know, for instance, he's in the hospital with his father, and he encounters the neurosurgery resident, and he feels this surge of kind of irrational anger towards this person just because of the way that he looks. And he tells us this. And so I'm kind of curious who Mukherjee is in the essay here, and what he's letting on about himself as a narrator.

Ellen Wayland-Smith  15:45

I also teach this essay in a class where we're talking about approaching analysis from the outside, as opposed to approaching it from the inside, or approaching it from an objective, sort of scientific point of view, as opposed to approaching it from an interior, subjective or personal, anecdotal point of view. And one thing that my students always mentioned about this essay is that he initially tries to solve the problem of his father as a physician, as a he tries, or he at least has that lens through which he can analyze what's happening sort of objectively, analytically to his father's body, but that there's that moment where the the nurse says, you know, we'll be the doctor, you'd be the son. And that that's the sort of pivot that he's going back and forth between, is of trying to unpack, or, you know, sort of follow his father's death in his position as a doctor versus his position as a son. 

Zach Fine  16:45

That's really interesting. I never thought, yeah, that moment, I guess, serves as a kind of hinge in the essay itself, where even his voice as the essayist takes the kind of different role. It's not this kind of diagnostic crusade, but it's more of a kind of responsive, you know, trying to emotionally gauge things as they're changing.

Ellen Wayland-Smith  17:03

I think so, yeah.

Jessica Swoboda  17:06

You mentioned earlier that you see this essay in some ways as a meditation on entropy, and the passage you selected seems to gesture towards that and capture that a bit. So can we turn there now? And can you read that for us?

Ellen Wayland-Smith  17:21

Yes. Objects at rest, Newton told us, remain at rest until acted on by outside forces. Newton’s universe was governed by inertia and motion, a clockwork cosmos run by inviolable laws. Bodies put into motion streaked toward oblivion, until acted on by other forces that would make them stop their motion.

But living beings, Walter Cannon realized, were not Newtonian abstractions. To make warm biology out of cold physics, organisms had to evolve their own laws to counter the inevitabilities of inertia and decay. In the long run, Cannon knew, we’ll all turn into objects at rest. The Red Queen will stop running and be hurtled away; the chilled penguin will eventually cool its heels to zero. The standing body will fall down, fall ill. Yet we keep saying, Look, it’s nothing, until we become nothing. It’s as if nature were built to defy the most natural of all laws: that all of us, in the end, will cool, die, diffuse, dissipate.

Jessica Swoboda  18:26

So why did you choose this passage to discuss with us?

Ellen Wayland-Smith  18:30

I think because a lot of my own essays actually have as their backdrop the larger picture of the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy. I didn't even really realize it when I read this essay, and it wasn't something I was thinking about when I wrote the first essay of my book, but as I continued to write essays that eventually ended up in the collection I published last year, I think entropy became a sort of controlling metaphor for the kinds of decays and dissolutions I was trying to talk about. So I think for me, I'm just very attracted to this notion of a world constantly headed towards heat death, constantly headed towards equilibrium, working out the kinks and the tensions until everything's absolutely equal, and what we're doing in the meantime, before we get there. I don't know if that makes any sense at all, but I think I mean the other thing that I liked about this essay and that I think I bring into my essays, as well is this sense of the breaking of habit, which is an important way that I think, not only intellectually, but sort of emotionally or even physically in the world. A lot of my own essays deal with my experience having cancer, and the way in which illness is something that comes to interrupt the blindness, really, of habit. You know, you're just walking forward and not thinking about anything, because you're just walking forward doing what you always do, and then suddenly you're not. And that moment when the forces of entropy strike you, whether it's illness or whatever other sort of catastrophe might befall you, business as usual stops, and that necessarily forces you to think about what that business was to begin with.

Jessica Swoboda  20:38

Right. One thing as you were just talking now, I was thinking about the essays in your collection, The Science of Last Things, and this essay too. And it's like this focus and kind of reflection on the interwovenness and entanglement of every things in our everyday lives, and how very intricately woven they are, and how it's, yeah, hard to see it if we don't stop to kind of meditate or examine it, right? And that, I mean, there's this line in your Corpus Christi essay where you say at the end, serve as a reminder that we are all shards of a larger whole that transcends our knowing that the edge of our skin is not an end, but a beginning, not a closing off, but in opening up the breach that binds us to each other. And then in the essay that we are talking about today, the natural magic, you're again talking about, kind of how the natural and our everyday lives are just so interwoven. And I guess this is a very long-winded way of me asking, why is that so central? Why is that idea present in this Mukherjee essay, but also in your collection as well? Maybe I'm making something up or putting something in there that it's not.

Ellen Wayland-Smith  21:50

No, absolutely, absolutely no. I think it is there. And I think the idea of the inner woveness, I mean, to get back to what Mukherjee was saying about systems, right? Like, if we don't, systems are operating visibly, if they're operating well, and that occludes and forces us to be non-cognizant of all the work that's going into them, and the way in which the kinds of relationships that have to be set up and put in motion in order for a system to work, and so maybe epiphany is too strong a word for it, but I do think that these moments, for me, when you suddenly get a privileged glimpse into the heart of a system—because you're you're forced to be like, Okay, what's wrong? Why is the system not working?—that has worked for me. I mean, that has been an important sort of repetitive experience in my own life, sort of coming to terms with, you know, larger metaphysical questions of like, why are we here and what, what's it all for? But I think I also maybe I am sort of stuck on this idea of discovering through breakdown, the sort of mystery and the value of what is breaking or, on the contrary, through breakdown, discovering the horror of the thing that the system that we are participating in, without acknowledging the kinds of labor and the kinds of possible abuse that go into it. And I think you know what I'm teaching, one of the classes I teach is on cultural criticism, where the students pick a cultural object. And it's interesting. I've been teaching this class for ten years now. In the beginning, they used to pick actual objects, like a thermos flask or a college sweatshirt. Now, all the objects they pick are digital, it's, you know, a meme. It's somebody's Instagram, an Instagram post, right? Their lives are receding further and further into the digital realm, which doesn't make it less interesting. But point being, I have them pick these surface phenomena from the world and then dig into them and say, you know, what allows this to exist? What allows this meme to hit, what allows this meme to go viral? What are the sort of hidden, sort of cultural underpinnings or assumptions or power relationships that make this something that works? So I always have that sort of thing happening too, right? This idea that some of the best discoveries that we make, even moral discoveries, happen when we we break our habits, or we stop and look at some, you know, we take a moment to look at something that normally we just sort of consume or absorb without things. Thinking and really force ourselves to confront how it functions.

Zach Fine  25:04

Talking about your students in the classroom just it's making me think about how a lot of the students I've worked with in recent years, they really want to write rated types of essays, like Mukherjee and the kind of framework you gave us at the beginning, the Huxley of the objective, the personal and the abstract. I thought it was really helpful way of, kind of, you know, breaking it down. And I'm kind of curious if you if we were to not to be too schematic about it, but if we were to look at the Mukherjee, how you would portion those sections off? Or does it seem like a clear division between those three for you that are, you know, well graded in the essay, or is one more heavily weighted than the other, right?

Ellen Wayland-Smith  25:42

That's interesting. Yeah, I've gone through for the purposes of teaching, tried to sort of highlight the sections where each and it doesn't really work exactly, they're not equally weighted. The way I tried to explain it to my students is that the there's a narrative spine that begins with the phone call and ends with the father dying, and then off of that spine come the sort of ribs. And the ribs are the outside sources, and this is how I teach them to bring to identify some sort of narrative or experiential moment that they want to examine or talk about, and use that as the spine, and then bring in the research to sort of corroborate it, or to, you know, sort of amplify it, bring a private experience into the realm of public mattering.

Zach Fine  26:33

And you use that metaphor of the body for other essays, not just the Mukherjee, the idea of the spine and the ribs. Because I love that in the context of this essay

Ellen Wayland-Smith  26:42

Oh, yeah, yeah. I use it for other essays as well, I guess. But I was always thinking of it as a tree. That's interesting, yeah. And so, so what he brings in here, he brings in outside, he brings in Walter Cannon that, you know, the scientist who sort of discovered, or coined the term homeostasis. I think there's three different scientists he brings in. And so that, for me, was the sort of objective, you know, you've got the personal poll, if you want to use Huxley's terms, and then the objective poll is where he brings in this sort of theory of homeostasis, and the way in which biology, oh, he brings it, brings in Claude Bernard at one point. And so those are kind of the the ribs, or the the branches, where he weaves in a larger context of biological thinking about how living systems function. And then for me, I it's sort of microcosm, macrocosm as well. I mean, the microcosm of the essay is his father's body, and we very minutely follow the steps by which his father's body flies apart, basically dissolves, but he makes at least, and not an extended, but at least implicit analogy to the system of the emergency room, the system of Delhi, the city. And then he expands outwards to the the ultimate macrocosm, which is the cosmos, right? That all of these systems are sort of nested within each other, and they're all being held together through these invisible forces that eventually sort of give away.

Zach Fine  28:26

Well, the macrocosm/microcosm distinction, I think, brings us naturally to your essay, "Natural Magic," which was published in the American Scholar in 2021. Could you tell us a little bit about the essay and how you see it in relationship to the Mukherjee? 

Ellen Wayland-Smith  28:43

So I think again, without even knowing it, the microcosm/macrocosm idea might have been implanted in my brain from from reading the Mukherjee, and then it just seemed like a natural sort of way to develop my own experience with being sick and wondering how this sort of inside of a sick body relates to the outside. You know, I wrote two essays about the experience of having cancer. One about sort of metaphors of cancer in the early modern world and comparing it to a crab, as you know, the sort of annoying, fretting, eating disease. And then this one is more about the experience of, sort of comparing my own experience of falling apart, and the way in which the falling apart of bodies in a secular 21st century is very much an atomized experience. It's very individual and lonely, I would say, because we've ceased to sort of see ourselves as connected to to any sort of larger system. I mean, we people who you know, don't you? Or partake of any sort of larger ecological or biological or theological sort of system that they belong to or participate in in any meaningful way. And so for me, like I mean that the point of the essay, I guess, is to look at the way in which early modern experiences of illness always implied that and something that's unbalanced in the body mirrors or is in some way induced by an imbalance in the cosmos, or an imbalance in the in the natural world surrounding the person in the that you can bring balance back to the body by sort of putting it in contact with the sort of external, cosmic or planetary or natural sources that will sort of equalize it in its the body's relationship with its larger context, and just how, you know, sort of unscientific, but also how sort of reassuring That must have been on some level to believe that you're thoroughly, sort of plugged into some larger system of meaning.

Jessica Swoboda  31:09

Now this essay is part of your recent collection, The Science of Last Things. And I'm wondering, kind of where, how does that this essay fit within the collection? What? What do you mean by "the science of last things"? I'd love to hear more about just this collection as a whole.

Ellen Wayland-Smith  31:25

Yeah, so science of last things is actually sort of my loose translation of eschatology, which is the branch of theology that deals with, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, signs of how we will know that the end of the world is happening, right, that the world is collapsing, and at least in the Christian tradition, that the second coming is going to happen. I mean, when I first started,  the first essay I ever wrote was the one about my father dying, and then I was diagnosed with cancer soon after that, and wrote a bunch of essays about the experience of cancer. In in 2018 we were evacuated from our house in LA for the fires of 2018, 2016 with Donald Trump's election, everything just felt kind of like apocalyptic around those years. And so initially, the science of last things was this idea of—the initial subtitle was "essays on endings." And my idea was that I wanted to think about endings and how even a narrative sense of pacing, or what what does it mean to end something? What does it mean to come to a close, and how feelings of impending apocalypse, whether it be eco apocalypse or political apocalypse or the apocalypse of our own bodies in illness, how that sort of affects how we how we think about things. And then I think that that sort of receded, that sense of apocalypticness receded, not for any real good reason. I mean, of course, all the issues that were there in 2016 continue to be with us. But I think as I wrote my way into this, it began to feel a little less about endings and more about questioning is an ending, really an ending. And in some of the essays, as you mentioned, are about trying to question where boundaries actually exist, between bodies or between people or between communities, right? And trying to have a more maybe permeable notion of of endings, if we see them in the spatial sense of, you know, a skin enclosing a body, or, you know, a wall and closing a city or an ecosystem and closing itself. Right, what are the ways in which we can see these boundaries as as more permeable, not as as ends but as openings into something else or something different.

Zach Fine  34:15

Speaking of endings, I was wondering if you could read the last paragraph of "Natural Magic" for us, because this morning, I was kind of reading it over and over again. I think it's one of the most beautiful paragraphs I've read in a long time. And I think for somebody who hasn't read the essay yet, a lot of its major themes might not appear for them, because they won't know about the U bark, for instance, and other things. But I would love it if you could read it, because I think it really distills so much of what much of what's great about the essay.

Ellen Wayland-Smith  34:46

After Michael hooks me up, I sit nodding beneath my chemo Ivy tree, a sack of tax a tear hanging from its metal branches like a swollen, plastic fruit. I imagine the matter rich, earthy origins of this. Alex. Her the roughness of scraped brown tree bark and crushed needles boiled and baked into a clear quintessence, and suddenly, the self enclosed loop of my body splits open like a vein and floods into the larger wheel of natural life, mixing my blood with its blood universal, tumble and whirl the stars in my cells slips of you, circling through my tissues, carrying out their chemical magic in the blind heart of my flesh, binding and unbinding, ever shifting atoms blooming into momentary constellations that, with a dash of luck, will write my body's wobbly universe, at least for a time. It's wonderful.

Zach Fine  35:44

Well, Ellen, thank you so much for joining us on Selected Essays.

Ellen Wayland-Smith  35:47

Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Yes, thank you.

Jessica Swoboda  35:52

Thanks everyone for joining us on this episode of selected essays. We'd like to thank Joe moss for editing the podcast, and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits for contributing the original music as always. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please subscribe to The Point. There's a discount code for listeners in the show notes. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selectedessays@thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time, listeners.