I managed to get into that program at Yale, which turned out to be a terrific choice for somebody who wants to write. A bad choice if you want to — as I was going to do — be a teacher, because there are not that many American Studies departments. And a lot of the people who graduate from that program would end up at the bottom of the heap in somebody’s history department or English department. But it’s absolutely great for writers. I discovered sociology there, which was like a light bulb going on over my head. Like most liberal arts students, I’d always looked down my nose at sociology as this kind of bogus science. When I finally had to deal with it in graduate school, I quickly came to the conclusion, which I maintain to this day, that it is, in fact, the queen of the sciences. I won’t get into this, but biology, in my mind, is a subset of sociology, not the other way around.