Category: History
Canada and America in Better Times
On November 4, 1979, a mob of radical university students and supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, surged over the wall and occupied the US Embassy in Tehran. Fifty two Americans were taken hostage but six evaded capture. Hiding out for days, the escapees managed to contact Canadian diplomat John Sheardown and Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor and asked for help. The Government of Canada reports:
Taylor didn’t hesitate. The Americans would be given shelter – the question was where. Because the Canadian Chancery was right downtown, it was far too dangerous. It would be better to split up the Americans. Taylor decided Sheardown should take three of hostages to his house, while he would house the others at the official residence. They would be described to staff as tourists visiting from Canada. Taylor immediately began drafting a cable for Ottawa.
…Taylor’s telegram set off a frenzy of consultation in the Department of External Affairs….Michael Shenstone, immediately concurred that Canada had no choice but to shelter the fugitives. Under-Secretary Allan Gotlieb agreed. Given the danger the Americans were in, he noted, there was “in all conscience…no alternative but to concur” despite the risk to Canadians and Canadian property.
The Minister, Flora MacDonald, could not be immediately reached as she was involved in a television interview. However, when finally informed of the situation, she agreed that Taylor must be permitted to act…[Prime Minister Joe Clark was pulled] from Question Period in the House of Commons, she briefed him on the situation and obtained his immediate go-ahead. Soon after, a telegram was sent to Tehran – Taylor could act to save the Americans. He was told that knowledge of the situation would be on a strict “need-to-know” basis.
The CIA reports:
The exfiltration task was daunting–the six Americans had no intelligence background; planning required extensive coordination within the US and Canadian governments; and failure not only threatened the safety of the hostages but also posed considerable risk of worldwide embarrassment to the US and Canada.
…After careful consideration of numerous options, the chosen plan began to take shape. Canadian Parliament agreed to grant Canadian passports to the six Americans. The CIA team together with an experienced motion-picture consultant devised a cover story so exotic that it would not likely draw suspicions–the production of a Hollywood movie.
The team set up a dummy company, “Studio Six Productions,” with offices on the old Columbia Studio lot formerly occupied by Michael Douglas, who had just completed producing The China Syndrome. This upstart company titled its new production “Argo” after the ship that Jason and the Argonauts sailed in rescuing the Golden Fleece from the many-headed dragon holding it captive in the sacred garden–much like the situation in Iran. The script had a Middle Eastern sci-fi theme that glorified Islam. The story line was intentionally complicated and difficult to decipher. Ads proclaimed Argo to be a “cosmic conflagration” written by Teresa Harris (the alias selected for one of the six awaiting exfiltration).
President Jimmy Carter approved the rescue operation.
The American diplomats escaped and all the Canadians quickly exited before the Iranian government realized what had happened. The Canadian embassy was closed. The story of the ex-filtration is told in the excellent movie, Argo, directed by and starring Ben Affleck. (The movie ups the American involvement for Hollywood but is still excellent.)
The CIA reports on what happened when the Americans made it back home:
News of the escape and Canada’s role quickly broke. Americans went wild in celebrating their appreciation to Canada and its Embassy staff. The maple leaf flew in a hundred cities and towns across the US. Billboards exclaimed “Thank you Canada!” Full-page newspaper ads expressed American’s thanks to its neighbors to the north. Thirty-thousand baseball fans cheered Canada’s Ambassador to Iran and the six rescued Americans, honored guests at a game in Yankee Stadium.
I remember this time well because my father, a professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Toronto, happened to be giving a talk in Boston when the news broke. He was immediately mobbed by appreciative Americans, who thanked him, clapped him on the back, and bought him drinks. My father was moved by the American response but was also somewhat bemused, considering he was also Iranian. (Though, in truth, my father was the ideal Canadian and he had his own experiences exfiltrating people from Iran—but that story remains Tabarrok classified.)
Some history of higher education
To Dr. Damrosch, who has studied academic culture at colleges, the current turmoil was vaguely reminiscent of a 1940s episode at the school now known as Iowa State University.
The school’s economics department — in a paper on economic policy for wartime food production — had proposed replacing butter with margarine, said Dr. Damrosch. The dairy industry and its supporters in the state legislature “went ballistic,” he said, pressuring the school’s president to place the department under receivership.
The move triggered an immediate backlash and mass departure of faculty members.
It might have also played a small role in the reshaping of the higher education landscape: At least six professors fled to Chicago, where they helped build one of the most renowned economics departments in the world.
Here is the full NYT piece, mostly about Columbia, via Anecdotal.
What should I ask Helen Castor?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Helen Ruth Castor FRSL (born 4 August 1968) is a British historian of the medieval and Tudor period and a BBC broadcaster. She taught history at the University of Cambridge and is the author of books including Blood and Roses (2004) and She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (2010). Programmes she has presented include BBC Radio 4‘s Making History and She-Wolves on BBC Four. Her most recent book is The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (2024).
I very much liked her last book in particular. And here is a good interview with her. So what should I ask her?
Why Spain’s transition to democracy remains controversial
New podcast series on Latin American political economy, with Rasheed Griffith and Diego Sánchez de la Cruz, all in English.
The importance of the chronometer
The chronometer, one of the greatest inventions of the modern era, allowed for the first time for the precise measurement of longitude at sea. We examine the impact of this innovation on navigation and urbanization. Our identification strategy leverages the fact that the navigational benefits provided by the chronometer varied across different sea regions depending on the prevailing local weather conditions. Utilizing high-resolution data on climate, ship routes, and urbanization, we argue that the chronometer significantly altered transoceanic sailing routes. This, in turn, had profound effects on the expansion of the British Empire and the global distribution of cities and populations outside Europe.
That is from a newly published paper by Martina Miotto and Luigi Pascali. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What Did We Learn From Torturing Babies?
As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. You might think that this was an absurd thing to believe given that babies cry and exhibit all the features of pain and pain avoidance. Yet, for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the straightforward sensory evidence was dismissed as “pre-scientific” by the medical and scientific establishment. Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not yet developed enough to feel pain, at least not in the way that older children and adults feel pain. Crying and pain avoidance were dismissed as simply reflexive. Indeed, babies were thought to be more like animals than reasoning beings and Descartes had told us that an animal’s cries were of no more import than the grinding of gears in a mechanical automata. There was very little evidence for this theory beyond some gesturing’s towards myelin sheathing. But anyone who doubted the theory was told that there was “no evidence” that babies feel pain (the conflation of no evidence with evidence of no effect).
Most disturbingly, the theory that babies don’t feel pain wasn’t just an error of science or philosophy—it shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now infamous 1985 case an open heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia (n.b. the link is hard reading). Parents were shocked when they discovered that this was standard practice. Publicity from the case and a key review paper in 1987 led the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare it unethical to operate on newborns without anesthesia.
In short, we tortured babies under the theory that they were not conscious of pain. What can we learn from this? One lesson is humility about consciousness. Consciousness and the capacity to suffer can exist in forms once assumed to be insensate. When assessing the consciousness of a newborn, an animal, or an intelligent machine, we should weigh observable and circumstantial evidence and not just abstract theory. If we must err, let us err on the side of compassion.
Claims that X cannot feel or think because Y should be met with skepticism—especially when X is screaming and telling you different. Theory may convince you that animals or AIs are not conscious but do you want to torture more babies? Be humble.
We should be especially humble when the beings in question are very different from ourselves. If we can be wrong about animals, if we can be wrong about other people, if we can be wrong about our own babies then we can be very wrong about AIs. The burden of proof should not fall on the suffering being to prove its pain; rather, the onus is on us to justify why we would ever withhold compassion.
Hat tip: Jim Ward for discussion.
Arctic Instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic Origins of East Asian Psychology
Highly speculative, but I found this of interest:
This article explores the hypothesis that modern East Asian populations inherited and maintained extensive psychosocial adaptations to arctic environments from ancestral Ancient Northern East Asian populations, which inhabited arctic and subarctic Northeast Eurasia around the Last Glacial Maximum period of the Late Pleistocene, prior to back migrating southwards into East Asia in the Holocene. I present the first cross-psychology comparison between modern East Asian and Inuit populations, using the latter as a model for paleolithic Arctic populations. The comparison reveals that both East Asians and the Inuit exhibit notably high emotional control/suppression, ingroup harmony/cohesion and subdomain unassertiveness, indirectness, self and social consciousness, reserve/introversion, cautiousness, and perseverance/endurance. The same traits have been identified by decades of research in polar psychology (i.e., psychological research on workers, expeditioners, and military personnel living and working in the Arctic and Antarctic) as being adaptive for, or byproducts of, life in polar environments. I interpret this as indirect evidence supporting my hypothesis that the proposed Arcticist traits in modern East Asian and Inuit populations primarily represent adaptations to arctic climates, specifically for the adaptive challenges of highly interdependent survival in an extremely dangerous, unpredictable, and isolated environment, with frequent prolonged close-quarters group confinement, and exacerbated consequences for social devaluation/exclusion/expulsion. The article concludes with a reexamination of previous theories on the roots of East Asian psychology, mainly that of rice farming and Confucianism, in the light of my Arcticism theory.
Here is the full paper by David Sun. Here is David’s related Substack.
Was our universe born inside a black hole?
Without a doubt, since its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized our view of the early universe, but its new findings could put astronomers in a spin. In fact, it could tell us something profound about the birth of the universe by possibly hinting that everything we see around us is sealed within a black hole.
The $10 billion telescope, which began observing the cosmos in the Summer of 2022, has found that the vast majority of deep space and, thus the early galaxies it has so far observed, are rotating in the same direction. While around two-thirds of galaxies spin clockwise, the other third rotates counter-clockwise.
In a random universe, scientists would expect to find 50% of galaxies rotating one way, while the other 50% rotate the other way. This new research suggests there is a preferred direction for galactic rotation…
“It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations,” team leader Lior Shamir, associate professor of computer science at the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering, said in a statement. “One explanation is that the universe was born rotating. That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole.
“But if the universe was indeed born rotating, it means that the existing theories about the cosmos are incomplete.”
…This has another implication; each and every black hole in our universe could be the doorway to another “baby universe.” These universes would be unobservable to us because they are also behind an event horizon, a one-way light-trapping point of no return from which light cannot escape, meaning information can never travel from the interior of a black hole to an external observer.
Here is the full story. Solve for the Darwinian equilibrium! Of course Julian Gough has been pushing related ideas for some while now…
Visiting the New Jersey shore
Did you know that the rest of the country (world?) calls it “the beach”? New Jerseyans call it “the shore.” (Why?)
While growing up, my mother would take my sister and me to the New Jersey shore for a week, each summer. My father would drive down and visit, but he was too much of a workaholic and too antsy to stay for long.
One of the first things you learn, living in The Great NJ, is that each and every town has its own identity. It feels quite different from the next town over, and has an individualized history and often a quite different ethnic mix. Before I knew any other social science, I learned that place really matters. And hovering at the horizon is the NYC skyline, a regular reminder that things can change rather quickly once you cross a line, in this case taking a bus across a river. I started thinking about “invisible borders” seriously and at a young age. Later, in high school, the kids were from either Hillsdale (my town), or from River Vale, one town over. We thought of them as the “wuss kids.”
So just about everyone is a regional thinker, and in New Jersey your “region” refers to your town or maybe county, not to the state.
This importance of place is true of shore towns as well. We spent time in various locales:
Asbury Park: This was early on, and I barely have memories of it. We decided it was “a dump,” and had seen better days. It had once been a glamour spot of sorts, with dance halls and gazebos. Later in life I would go back there for some of the older architecture, Bruce Springsteen landmarks, and Puerto Rican food.
Ocean Grove: The place we went when we were young. This town has fantastic Victorian homes, and an unusual role in the American history of religious revival camps. Holly and called it an “old people’s town.” Plus there was no boardwalk and everything was closed on Sundays. The ocean was wonderful and the walks were easy, but we always wanted to be somewhere else.
Point Pleasant: I haven’t been in so long, but I think of this as one of the most typical and representative of New Jersey shore towns. Holly and I were OK with this place.
Seaside Heights: This for us was the best, especially for my sister. It had lots of other young people, an active, retro-flavored boardwalk (I loved that game where you throw the ball up and try to have it land in the right slots for points), and the ocean water seemed rougher in a fun way. Eventually we settled on going here each year. Later the setting for Jersey Shore, the TV show.
I also went to some chess tournaments in Atlantic City (pre-gambling, quite run down), where I did very well, and when we were all grown we would meet up in Spring Lake, which is perhaps the actual nice shore town. Belmar and Cape May also received earlier visits, and we would stop for root beer in Toms River.
Even in the early days it was exciting to drive from one town to the next, like in Europe crossing from Germany into Luxembourg.
I did a lot of reading on the beach, for instance tackling both LOTR and Karl Popper’s Open Society books. In later years, Holly would be off with friends, and my mother and I would drive around, listening to Beatle songs on a weird 8-track tape that split up the songs when it changed tracks.
So early on I learned the idea of “local travel,” namely that a nearby trip can be no less fascinating. I consider that one of the most important practical ideas you can imbibe, along with “regional thinker.” I got them both quite young, and in a very convincing fashion.
An Economic Approach to Homer’s Odyssey: Part III
Published by Liberty Fund, by me, here is the third and final installment. Excerpt:
“Below is a brief and simplified catalog of the major polities described in The Odyssey:
- • Pylos and Sparta: Visited by Telemachus, superficially seem normal but they seem sadder on reflection and Sparta relies on intoxication to support public order.
- • Ogygia, or Calypso: An unbearable paradise, there is no utopia.
- • Phaeacia: Relatively well-run, inward-looking, passive-aggressive, “control freak” syndrome.
- • The Lotus Eaters: Another unbearable “utopia.”
- • The Cyclopes: Anarchistic, brutish, and the community is ineffective and unable to defend itself.
- • Aeolus: A closed society, based on incest, hostile to outsiders, a more extreme and dysfunctional version of Phaeacia.
- • Laestrygonia: Giants, they throw boulders and murder, and in some ways resemble the Cyclopes. Tendencies toward anarchy are widespread, and not confined to the Cyclopes.
- • Aeaea (Circe): There is the bed of tyrannical but beautiful Circe, or life as a well-fed pig. Again, utopias are impossible and immortality would bore us.
- • Cimmeria: Dark, bleak, and unloved by God. Possibly the default setting.
- • The Underworld: Everyone is sad (and dead), yet they talk like actual humans and also tell the truth. Lesson: the living cannot escape artifice and deception.
- • Ithaca: Usually wrapped up in war and revenge-taking, chaotic and lacking in trust and lacking in clarity about sovereignty. This is another one of the default options.
- • Syria: Initially prosperous but wrecked by the arrival of avaricious merchants. Unstable.
- • Crete: A diverse society of perfect trust, within a narrative of Odysseus-in-disguise, but it has no chance of existing.”
My overall goal has been to pull out the implicit “public choice” strands in Homer’s Odyssey. It is very much a poem about politics, and the book is among other things a study in comparative politics.
Do read the whole essay, and here are parts one and two.
Systematic bone tool production at 1.5 million years ago
Recent evidence indicates that the emergence of stone tool technology occurred before the appearance of the genus Homo1 and may potentially be traced back deep into the primate evolutionary line. Conversely, osseous technologies are apparently exclusive of later hominins from approximately 2 million years ago (Ma), whereas the earliest systematic production of bone tools is currently restricted to European Acheulean sites 400–250 thousand years ago. Here we document an assemblage of bone tools shaped by knapping found within a single stratigraphic horizon at Olduvai Gorge dated to 1.5 Ma. Large mammal limb bone fragments, mostly from hippopotamus and elephant, were shaped to produce various tools, including massive elongated implements. Before our discovery, bone artefact production in pre-Middle Stone Age African contexts was widely considered as episodic, expedient and unrepresentative of early Homo toolkits. However, our results demonstrate that at the transition between the Oldowan and the early Acheulean, East African hominins developed an original cultural innovation that entailed a transfer and adaptation of knapping skills from stone to bone. By producing technologically and morphologically standardized bone tools, early Acheulean toolmakers unravelled technological repertoires that were previously thought to have appeared routinely more than 1 million years later.
Here is the full article, in Nature, by Ignacio de la Torre, et.al. Again, do not forget Cowen’s 17th Law: “Most things have origins much earlier than what you thought.” Via Charles C. Mann. So exactly which of our other, broader views do we need to update?
Boettke on the Socialist Calculation Debate
An excellent EconTalk episode with Pete Boettke on the socialist calculation debate.
I like Boettke on the three Ps.
The three Ps–property, prices, and profits and loss. Property incentivizes us. Prices guide us. Profits lure us to new changes and losses discipline us.
Today, “incentives matter” is often considered the first lesson of economics. But not so in the 1930-1940s.
Yeah, it’s so weird to read 1930s economics. Hayek’s colleague, H.D Dickinson, at LSE–when he teaches his course on economics of planning, his first statement is, ‘We will truck with no incentive talk here.’ Okay. Lange, in his famous paper on socialism, says that incentives are psychological problems and therefore not economic theory.
Pete’s new book on the socialist calculation debate with Candella and Truit is very good and available here.
My Conversation with Carl Zimmer
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
He joins Tyler to discuss why it took scientists so long to accept airborne disease transmission and more, including why 19th-century doctors thought hay fever was a neurosis, why it took so long for the WHO and CDC to acknowledge COVID-19 was airborne, whether ultraviolet lamps can save us from the next pandemic, how effective masking is, the best theory on the anthrax mailings, how the U.S. military stunted aerobiology, the chance of extraterrestrial life in our solar system, what Lee Cronin’s “assembly theory” could mean for defining life itself, the use of genetic information to inform decision-making, the strangeness of the Flynn effect, what Carl learned about politics from growing up as the son of a New Jersey congressman, and much more.
Here is an excerpt:
COWEN: Over time, how much will DNA information enter our daily lives? To give a strange example, imagine that, for a college application, you have to upload some of your DNA. Now to unimaginative people, that will sound impossible, but if you think about the equilibrium rolling itself out slowly — well, at first, students disclose their DNA, and over time, the DNA becomes used for job hiring, for marriage, in many other ways. Is this our future equilibrium, that genetic information will play this very large role, given how many qualities seem to be at least 40 percent to 60 percent inheritable, maybe more?
ZIMMER: The term that a scientist in this field would use would be heritable, not inheritable. Inheritability is a slippery thing to think about. I write a lot about that in my book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, which is about heredity in general. Heritability really is just saying, “Okay, in a certain situation, if I look at different people or different animals or different plants, how much of their variation can I connect with variation in their genome?” That’s it. Can you then use that variability to make predictions about what’s going to happen in the future? That is a totally different question in many —
COWEN: But it’s not totally different. Your whole family’s super smart. If I knew nothing about you, and I knew about the rest of your family, I’d be more inclined to let you into Yale, and that would’ve been a good decision. Again, only on average, but just basic statistics implies that.
ZIMMER: You’re very kind, but what do you mean by intelligent? I’d like to think I’m pretty good with words and that I can understand scientific concepts. I remember in college getting to a certain point with calculus and being like, “I’m done,” and then watching other people sail on.
COWEN: Look, you’re clearly very smart. The New York Times recognizes this. We all know statistics is valid. There aren’t any certainties. It sounds like you’re running away from the science. Just endorse the fact you came from a very smart family, and that means it’s quite a bit more likely that you’ll be very smart too. Eventually, the world will start using that information, would be the auxiliary hypothesis. I’m asking you, how much will it?
ZIMMER: The question that we started with was about actually uploading DNA. Then the question becomes, how much of that information about the future can you get out of DNA? I think that you just have to be incredibly cautious about jumping to conclusions about it because the genome is a wild and woolly place in there, and the genome exists in environments. Even if you see broad correlations on a population level, as a college admission person, I would certainly not feel confident just scanning someone’s DNA for information in that regard.
COWEN: Oh, that wouldn’t be all you would do, right? They do plenty of other things now. Over time, say for job hiring, we’ll have the AI evaluate your interview, the AI evaluate your DNA. It’ll be highly imperfect, but at some point, institutions will start doing it, if not in this country, somewhere else — China, Singapore, UAE, wherever. They’re not going to be so shy, right?
ZIMMER: I can certainly imagine people wanting to do that stuff regardless of the strength of the approach. Certainly, even in the early 1900s, we saw people more than willing to use ideas about inherited levels of intelligence to, for example, decide which people should be institutionalized, who should be allowed into the United States or not.
For example, Jews were considered largely to be developmentally disabled at one point, especially the Jews from Eastern Europe. We have seen that people are certainly more than eager to jump from the basic findings of DNA to all sorts of conclusions which often serve their own interests. I think we should be on guard that we not do that again.
And:
COWEN: If we take the entirety of science, you’ve written on many topics in a very useful way, science policy. Where do you think your views are furthest from the mainstream or the orthodoxy? Where do you have the weirdest take relative to other people you know and respect? I think we should just do plenty of human challenge trials. That would be an example of something you might say, but what would the answer be for you?
I very much enjoyed Carl’s latest book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Air We Breathe.
Boris Spassky, RIP
In Leningrad’s embrace, midwinter’s chill, A prodigy was born with iron will. The chessboard’s call, a siren to his mind, Young Boris Spassky left his peers behind.
A crown he claimed in nineteen sixty-nine, Against Petrosian’s force, his star did shine. Yet Reykjavik’s cold winds would soon conspire, With Fischer’s challenge, stoking global fire.
The “Match of Century,” where East met West, Two minds engaged in psychological test. Though Spassky yielded, grace he did display, Applauding Fischer’s genius in the fray.
Beyond the board, his life took varied course, From Soviet roots to seeking new resource. In France he found a refuge, fresh terrain, Yet ties to Mother Russia would remain.
A “one-legged dissident,” some would declare, Not fully here nor there, a soul aware. Through Cold War’s tension, politics entwined, He stood apart, a free and thoughtful mind.
His games, a blend of strategy and art, Reflect the depth and courage of his heart. Now as we mourn his final checkmate’s fall, His legacy inspires players all.
Rest, Grandmaster, your battles now complete, Your journey etched where history and chess compete.
That is a tribute poem from GPT 4.5
1969
1969 was a big year for me. Most of all, we left Fall River and moved back to New Jersey, but this time to Bergen rather than Hudson County — Billy Joel comments. I’ll cover Bergen County another time, here were three other developments of import in my seven-year-old life in 1969:
1. The United States landed a man on the moon.
My parents let me stay up late to watch this, thank goodness. Of course I was very excited, and we heard all about it in school. This event drove my later interest in science fiction, space exploration, and also travel by jet. None of those were directions my career or writings went in, but they were early intellectual influences. At this point in the game, how could you not watch Star Trek reruns?
Back then, we all knew something special was happening, even I knew at age seven. I also began to understand that the United States was the country that did this, and what that meant. So I became more patriotic. The command center at NASA seemed to me a great achievement, in a way more impressive than the spaceship.
2. The New York Mets won the World Series.
Alas, I was no longer a Red Sox fan. The important thing here is that the New York Mets season, along with the moon landing of that same summer, was the first thing I truly followed with all of my attention. I learned how to keep on top of something, at least to the greatest degree possible given my constraints (which were extreme, starting with no internet but hardly ending there). In 1968 I watched baseball games, but in 1969 I followed The New York Mets and absorbed all of the available information about them, including reading newspapers, listening to radio talk shows, and digesting statistics on a regular basis.
That is a tendency that has stuck with me, and I first practiced it then and there.
3. I received my first transistor radio.
I don’t hear people talk about this much any more, but for me it was like the arrival of the internet. All of a sudden I was in regular touch with a big chunk of the world. I could hear the new music that was out. Could listen to the news. Find out sports scores. Hear talk shows. Or whatever. The menu was very America-centric, and the sound was terrible, but none of that mattered. The information superhighway had been opened for me.
I heard the Jackson Five song “I Want You Back,” and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Those tunes bored me quickly, and I returned to them and their excellence only later. But I knew they were out there, and I knew they were important. At least early on, I preferred The Archies “Sugar, Sugar,” Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy,” and oddities such as Zaeger and Evans “In the Year 2525.” How about “They’re Coming to Take Me Away”?
In fact they did not take me away, rather they ensconced me securely in New Jersey, in the momentous year of 1969.