As noted, all of the pieces in this collection were originally published individually, in substantially similar form to what’s presented here, in various magazines. A terrific consequence of this was that, in the process, I’ve gotten to work with some of the best editors in the business. And thus I thank Burkhard Bilger, Peter Brown, Alan Burdich, Jeff Csatari, Henry Finder, David Grogan, Marguerite Holloway, Emily Laber, Vittorio Maestro, Peter Moore, John Rennie, Rickie Rusting, Polly Schulman, and Gary Stix for their patience and skill in dealing with someone who should probably have been forced to take some English classes in college. Turning these individual articles into this book involved my getting to work with Colin Harrison and Sarah Knight at Scribner—it has been a pleasure to work with you, and I am grateful for your help in making it seem like these disparate pieces were actually meant to form a coherent whole. I thank my agent, Katinka Matson—this is our third book together, and she continues to be a great advocate and a wonderful judge of writing. Library assistance was provided by Kelly Parker and Lisa Pereira, and funds from the Bing Award and from the Hoagland Prize made it possible for me to initially ruminate over and eventually fulminate about these various topics.