Making a Little List

Now that marriage is becoming chic again, Zero Population Growth, the group that worries about overcrowding the planet, has launched a pre-emptive counterattack. The November issue of the ZPG National Reporter runs a list of "exceptional" only children in an attempt to bolster the argument of some psychologists that "onlies" tend to do better in life than those folks distracted by sibling rivalries. The compendium is impressive. Among the artists and poets, actors and statesmen, comics and scientists who were only children: Ann-Margret, Ansel Adams, Hannah Arendt, Charles Baudelaire, Willy Brandt, Arthur Burns, Richard Daley, Indira Gandhi, Elvis Presley, Richard Pryor, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Renata Tebaldi, Queen Victoria, Mary Wells, Jonathan Winters, Edmund Wilson. The trouble is, one could easily draw up at least as impressive a litany of luminaries who had brothers and sisters. Let's see, there was Moses, Milton, Napoleon...

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.