Term Paper Bullshit

A Matt Yglesias tweet makes an interesting point:

Talk of 844 page immigration bill is misleading—congress uses huge margins & leading like it’s cheating on a term paper.

And of course by "interesting point" I mean hey, here's an excuse to post some old bullshit of my own! Yay!

Meanwhile, in thinking about TOAFK I moseyed over to T.H. White's joint on Wikipedia, which tell us that he (allegedly (obviously)) did a thesis on Le Morte d'Arthur without having actually read the book. WHICH kickstarts White even closer to my heart than he already had been, as back in the day I was the Michael Jordan of not reading the book; looking at the back cover and the inside flaps and somehow getting 5-7 pages squeezed out (usually with a randomly-selected large block quote from the middle of the book, featuring a single word added in by myself to account for a whole extra "line of text.") This is a skill I learned early in high school; by college my talents were at such perfect pitch that I took a theater class in college and got an A without having any idea where the theater actually was on campus - upon being confronted by my professor about the validity of one of my "reviews" my performance was, ironically, award-winning theater.