After Swarthmore you went on to Harvard, you got a Ph.D., but you chose journalism over the academy.
Life is full of coincidences.
It lacks all the pleasures that your first four years of university have given you. It's a lonely existence. It's an unrewarding existence. It's a narrowing existence. That's a very enticing thing if, as I think of myself, you take a certain pleasure in writing and playing with words and paragraphs.