"So I give myself this opening question here... as if I'm writing an article for the New Yorker or something..."

I like how JY will roast answer choices that seemed sort of reasonable to me when I was taking this

I was stuck because it didn't seem like the author raised that many (ie. "a number of") explanatory hypotheses!

They just mentioned personal preferences and then hist. transform. (such as migrat. and seculariz.) I suppose that's three total? The author was mildly favorable to the two mentioned hist. transformations.