Born in the 1970s, I caught the very end of the culture Teachout mourns. My father spent years paying off a set of Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World on the installment plan. He read from it when he could, and eventually so did I. The set left me with the unfortunate impression that Homer wrote prose, that there was a single thing known as “the Western World,” that human thought culminated in Sigmund Freud (volume 54, right at the end), and that all geniuses were male. With effort and luck, I was able to overcome these prejudices. But the presence of these books in my home also gave me an early awareness that the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were things a person might read after coming home from a shift at Walmart. I have since learned that this is a hard thing for many putatively well-educated people to imagine, and so I look back on those volumes with warmth as well as skepticism.