It also has to do with the fact that I find history so much more interesting now than I did as a child. Youth is wasted on the young I suppose.

It was intriguing to learn that the Upper East Side of Manhattan was replete with coal-belching locomotives in the late 20th Century, and fun to be reminded that the man who founded my alma mater was one of the original robber barons.

Most compelling, though, was the ramifications of a fatal mishap in 1902, that was likely inevitable given the congestion of heavy steel running into the old terminal. The deaths led to a public outcry over safety, which fanned the dissent over the pollution spit out by the coal engines. The New York legislature acted quickly to ban coal engines’ entry into New York City, and forced the majors to go electric or to die. They went electric, and the new beautiful Grand Central was born, and the train service was never disrupted in the process.

I was amazed to see how quickly the captains of industry were forced to modify their bread and butter in the name of the public welfare–such a stark contrast to the tepid environmental regulations that have slodged through Congress in more recent history. One of the show’s historians said that it was useless for them to resist the teeming public sentiment, the socialist and populism clamor was a force too large to be reckoned with, and the railroad was lucky to get out with what it got.

This made me feel a bit envious, I’ll admit. Not since that gilded age have the wealthy and elite been so far removed from the rest of society as they are in this part of the 21st century. But where is our public outrage, our populist movement, and where is our yellow journalism calling for reform? Have the Rupert Murdochs simply done better than their forebears by convincing 5 x more Americans to pay more attention to last night’s American Idol than to its Super Tuesday results? Why is it that slightly better than half the voters, far from outraged or disgusted, buy into the notion that the free market will sort it all out?

Beats me. All I know is that this righteous indignation has made me hungry. I’m off to lunch at Grand Central, with other yuppies who get paid well doing the Man’s dirty work.

But, still, the algorithm works like magic–nary a request for cash from the NRA arrives, but rather far nobler requests for cash. The most recent delight spawned by its prescient demographic-tapping is the bargain rate offer for a National Geographic subscription. Best dollar-a-month purchase I’d made in some time. Until recently, my only experience with the magazine was as a porn-proxy back in grade school.

That grade school, incidentally, was recently the latest victim in a series of razings in my 800 person and counting prairie hometown that I may well never revisit. But this month’s issue of National Geographic provided a new kind of porn, a window into the world that I and countless others like me have left behind, for better or worse:

That’s the rub in rural North Dakota, a sense of things ebbing, of churches being abandoned, schools shutting down, towns becoming ruins. And all this decline exists amid a seeming statistical prosperity: Oil is booming, wheat prices are at record highs, and, as the average farm size grows, the land is studded with paper millionaires living in the lonely sweep of the plains, with surrounding community gone to the wind.

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