I suppose it’s a trivial grievance, but I spent four hours today at the Millers' brunch, and I feel a distinct sense of physiological exhaustion—the kind that has nothing to do with the mimosas. It’s a recurring anomaly in my social data. I’m seventy, retired from thirty years in the stacks, and I still haven't figured out why people in the suburbs talk as if their children's standardized testing scores are the only valid metric of human value. It’s quite frankly PATHETIC. I don’t even know why I went, other than the fact that my lawn looks too pristine to be the house where the local hermit lives. The environment was sterile.