If scientists at the Santa Fe Institute cured death, or teleported matter, or widened the electromagnetic spectrum, their central achievement would still be the befriending of Cormac McCarthy. America’s greatest living writer is not known to mingle much outside this maverick research group in the New Mexico steppe. His latest novels, which digress into mathematics and string theory, bear the stamp of his learned friends.

McCarthy is careless of “relevance”. He wrote about 19th-century scalp hunters during the Reagan boom. It is with his turn to science that at last he reflects a modern trend: the declining prestige of the humanities.

A liberal arts education was once the price of admission into polite society. Don’t assume that will hold true a generation from now. There is too much reputational wear and tear to contend with.