I am having fun with columns that are “lists,” which I have relished ever since I was a boy, making lists of all manner of things. Lists strongly appeal to me for two reasons seemingly in tension with one another. On the one hand, lists invariably satisfy an urge for order (this is a high priority for me—when I was a boy, I enjoyed reading Leviticus, for the sense of order it communicated). On the other hand, lists often appeal to those who, like me, delight in the heterogeneous. A list of favorite movies or baseball players (shortstops from Major League Baseball history over the last fifty years, say) or novelists who flourished in the 1980s, will be delightfully heterogeneous and neatly ordered at the same time.