The always insightful Ms. Cheever wrote a piece for the NYT that both identified an interesting phenomenon and gave me a new book to ferret out ("America Anonymous" by Benoit Denizet-Lewis).
And if you scroll down and read the Comments on her essay , you'll find a wild mixed bag, much more mixed than I expected -- some of them worthwhile, some of them off the mark, some actually hostile -- and some quite illuminating, though perhaps not in the way the commenter intended.
