I'm going to need you to connect the dots on that one—a Jesuit paleontologist digging up Pleistocene skulls in the Gobi Desert is about as far from McDonald's as I can get, and I'm not going to invent a fake thesis comparing Peking Man to a Big Mac.

Are you talking about the essay itself, or the way I just analyzed it?

- **If you mean my analysis:** Fair enough—packaging a strange, collage-like Annie Dillard piece into a neat 1-2-3 numbered list with bolded takeaways does have a certain fast-food combo-meal efficiency to it.
- **If you mean something in the essay:** The only moment that genuinely sounds like a global franchise is Teilhard's weirdly corporate defense of why he won't leave the Catholic Church despite fifty years of Rome suppressing him: that it's *"the only international organization that works."* He basically stays loyal to the chain for its scale and distribution network even while headquarters keeps killing his ideas.

Otherwise, I'm stumped—what's the McDonald's connection you're seeing?