A few months before the lockdowns I got an email from someone calling themselves “Donald Fagen.” Surely this was one of my friends gaslighting me, yet I could not imagine any of them possessing even the basic coding skills required for creating a convincing fake email account. But it actually turned out to be the real Donald Fagen. A few years ago I’d written an essay in praise of Steely Dan’s 1980 masterpiece Gaucho, and he was checking in to say that he read it and liked it, thus putting me in contact with the mysterious entity that had presided like an oracle over my childhood....…A few months before the lockdowns I got an email from someone calling themselves “Donald Fagen.” Surely this was one of my friends gaslighting me, yet I could not imagine any of them possessing even the basic coding skills required for creating a convincing fake email account. But it actually turned out to be the real Donald Fagen. A few years ago I’d written an essay in praise of Steely Dan’s 1980 masterpiece Gaucho, and he was checking in to say that he read it and liked it, thus putting me in contact with the mysterious entity that had presided like an oracle over my childhood....WW…