It is 2:30 a.m. of a Monday, spring semester, 1983. Things are looking extremely good. Forty-eight hours of high-intensity stack work and some inspired typing have produced the thirty-page final paper for Modern European History (Mr. Blague, MW 9-10) that you were supposed to be working on all semester but that an unfortunate dispute involving a car, which, as you have repeatedly pointed out, really wasn’t in such good shape when you borrowed it, has prevented you from giving the time and attention you sincerely intended.

Please read Louis Menand’s review of the new edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, which appears in this week’s New Yorker and is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in that magazine.