1I have recently begun reading David Foster Wallace's collection of essays Consider the Lobster, a paradigm of journalistic excellence. Mr. Wallace marries factual, detailed reporting on a variety of topics with smart, articulate prose. (I discovered his essay "Consider the Lobster," the title piece for Wallace's own book, in the 2005 edition of Best American Essays, and subsequently went out looking for more of his work.) Clearly I have been under his influence: in addition to providing an abundance of factual and subjective glosses, Mr. Wallace has some very lengthy footnotes, some of which are two pages long, in very tiny, footnote-sized font. Some of these references have one or two footnotes of their own (I am not embellishing here); these double-feet are in nearly microscopic.
2Not to toot my own horn (okay, maybe just a little,) but the data provided in the last three entries were from very trustworthy sources (IMF, CDC, etc)*, so the reader and I can use them with considerable confidence. I did not have to go poking around the 'web for figures that would corroborate my opinions; I merely took them from the sources I deemed most reliable. From this, we can infer that I am (as usual,) right, and that the facts have born this out.
3You the reader can have the assurance that there will always be at least a small injection of the truth into my blog entries. Should my fact-finding missions ever yield information contrary to what I expected (what a ridiculous subjunctive), I will honestly report them as such.
*Look, my own footnoted footnote! (That is, if you accept the above three points as glosses to the three preceding entries.) I myself sometimes worry about the veracity of the content of my favorite information source, Wikipedia. But check out this article from the Economist! Though the correspondent expresses some reservations about Wikipedia, on the whole the review is quite approbative.
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