 Now there's a segment of all of these conversations, it's called underrated, overrated. I mentioned a name or a thing, I ask you if you think it's underrated or overrated, you're free to pass on any of these, but I'll try just a few. The pet rock, overrated or underrated? Well, I'm coming from a position of extreme bias because I again did the obit of the inventor of the pet rock, a man named Gary Dahl, and it was neither overrated nor underrated, it was a beautiful example of what it was. It was a totemic thing that caught the fancy of this kind of cheesy 70 pop culture. So with hindsight, overrated perhaps, but had it not been overrated, we wouldn't have gotten the story out of it. Now you have a background as a cellist I understand, so Pablo Casals, overrated or underrated? Overrated, I mean I think he can never be rated highly enough, but it was he, and this is well documented through his series of televised masterclasses around the world in the very early 60s, who really caused the instrument's popularity to soar, but most people had really not conceived of the cello as a solo instrument before, it was just sort of going um-pa-pa at the bottom of the orchestra. So I mean he was rated magnificently, but by the same token you can never rate him too highly, because he was wonderful. But what if I say, well Casals was a bit like Schnabel, he had incredible profundity, there's just too much scraping on a lot of his recordings, in some ways they're hard to listen to today. He was path breaking, but if you were to sit down and put on say the Bach cello suits, actually very few people, including cello lovers, would pick Casals, right? They'd pick Janna Starker, they'd pick Heinrich Schiff, or you agree or not? It's true in light of modern sensibilities, you can certainly hear squeaks and occasional bits of strangeness in the Casals cello suites, I suspect he was older when he recorded them, he lived to be of course almost a hundred, recording technology has improved since then, and I think he was on such an exalted plane that he gets a buy, he can be and should be forgiven any of these little transgressions that make him seem mortal. If you had to pick a favorite cellist, I know it's hard to do, but do you have a pick? It depends on the genre, I like different cellists for different things, the great doomed Jacqueline Dupre, of course, was a wonderful cellist, Rostropovich Starker, who's all that I wrote. You have a wonderful book called The Riddle of the Labyrinth, the quest to crack an ancient code where you study the world before ancient Greece, fantastic book, it's a story of how after cracking the code we learned a lot of it was actually about accounting, economic themes, but I'll ask you, Homer's Odyssey, overrated or underrated? Oh, again, can't rate it highly enough. Can't rate it highly enough, we agree, adverbs, overrated or underrated? Overused. So they're overrated, in a sense. Maurice Sendock, the author of famous children's stories, where the wild things are, maybe the wild things are the children, right? Overrated or underrated? Oh, again, can't rate him highly enough, and his legacy will endure, again, his oath that I had the privilege of doing, times put it on page one, that's, you know, when is the time's ever going to put a picture book author on page one, that's how magnificent he was, and how newsworthy. Was there something surprising you learned about him, doing his a bit? I think just what a melancholic he was. Now that's far from unusual for creative people, but it was, his personal story was rather painful. He was someone, someone who grew up poor, Jewish, knowing he was gay in this very repressive era. He was a deeply, deeply melancholy man, and of course it comes through in the work as well. Studying all these different lives, from so many walks of life, different countries, to some extent, different eras, what in life do you feel is underrated or overrated? Say by your readers. So there's various cliches, like, oh, I spent too much time in the office, not enough with family. So many people say that. I don't actually believe they necessarily really mean it. But what do you feel, on that, after studying all this history, what in life is underrated? Well, I think list questions are overrated, if you'll forgive me. What in life is underrated? Silence, stillness, reading real books on paper. Those are all underrated. Yeah, having real human contact rather than the social media that's become in our atomized, postmodern lives, a substitute for real contact.