Codecels win Nobel Prize in Chemistry, completely over for chemistcels

WRT the winning book I'll share this excerpt from St. Augustine's Confessions, book 3, Chapter 2 "In Public Spectacles He is Moved by an Empty Compassion. He is Attacked by a Troublesome Spiritual Disease":

Stage-plays also drew me away, full of representations of my miseries and of fuel to my fire. Why does man like to be made sad when viewing doleful and tragical scenes, which yet he himself would by no means suffer? And yet he wishes, as a spectator, to experience from them a sense of grief, and in this very grief his pleasure consists. What is this but wretched insanity? For a man is more affected with these actions, the less free he is from such affections.

In my wretchedness at that time I loved to feel sorrow, and I sought out opportunities for sorrow. In the false misery of another man as it was mimicked on the stage, that actor's playing pleased me most and had the strongest attraction for me which struck tears from my eyes.

I think about this quotation a lot and find his condemnation of a "false and empty compassion" borne out of media provocative. Thoughts?