I knew I wouldn’t ever do so in academia. Yet I still hungered to write a book of ideas. My books were focused, well-documented demonstrations of some minor fact about the world. In the years that followed, I wrote books, but not deep books of ideas. Instead, I learned to do research and write clearly. So I did what most intellectually ambitious young Americans do. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have anything deep to say. Intellectuals talked seriously about them in magical places like New York and San Francisco, places I-being in Kansas-knew nothing about. I had in mind the kind of “deep” book that public intellectuals of the 1950s and ’60s wrote: The Lonely Crowd, The One-Dimensional Man, The End of Ideology. When I was young I wanted to write a challenging book of ideas.
