A particularly annoying weird conservative professor in the philosophy department at the college I went to was very proud of this marshmallow he kept on a shelf in his office. He was obsessed with research related to how well kids do on “the marshmallow test” as a predictor of monetary success in life. (the correlation is real; what it means? a whole other story.) I think about how stale that marshmallow must be after all those years- I wonder if he ever ate it? Did it turn to dust in his mouth?