Have you stood in front of a newsstand lately? 400 Star-laden Pages. 115 Things To Do With Cheese. The 27 Faces Of Infidelity. Numbers and lists dominate the mediascape. Why? Is it a brutish apotheosis of private property—thoughts as things, and the more the better? Is it the end of civilization? In a word (actually, over 1,500 of them!), yes.

I'm curious about what our trust in lists means—from the New York Times' "100 Notable Books of the Year" and the Fortune 500, to the endless gush of long and short lists for book prizes. Why are we such suckers for numbers? To me, numbers flaunt a kind of bogus, unearned power, like border officials, or the doormen of trendy clubs.

But lists are deeply American; the possibility of rising up the list from the bottom of the heap to Number One is what the American Dream is all about.

So here is a list of thirteen possible reasons why, for better or worse, human beings love to list.