Fun footnote from Gregory Clark‘s new The Son Also Rises:

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In my second year as an assistant professor at Stanford
University, I was assigned the task of mentoring six freshmen.  Each appeared on paper to have an incredible
range of interests for an eighteen-year-old: chess club, debate club, history
club, running team, volunteering with homeless shelters.  I soon discovered that these supposed
interests were just an artifact of the U.S. college admission process, adopted
to flesh out the application forms and discarded as soon as they have worked
their magic.