Postponed Footnotes

I saw this article through a link John Stackhouse posted on his FB feed. Footnotes can be found for some books at an online site. Yikes.

Source:

I had one such experience recently. I was working on a review of William Deresiewicz’s “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life” (Free Press), which appeared in last week’s issue of the magazine. Deresiewicz’s reasoning, which is part sociology and part steam-whistle blast, relies heavily on data: a “large-scale survey” about student well-being among college freshmen, statistics from various campuses about post-collegiate employment, and so on. The numbers are supposed to lend credence to his argument, although most are cited without much context. How selective had Deresiewicz been, I wondered, in quoting data from some colleges and not from others? (And how “large-scale” was that survey, really? Had its methodologies or results been contested since publication?) Questions often arise when you read a nonfiction book, and resolving them is usually easy—you just go to the sources. I expected to do a lot of that as I read. The first time a question arose, I flipped to the back of the text.

In the place where the endnotes should have been, there was this direction: “For source notes and suggestions for further reading, go to excellentsheep.com.” O.K., sure. I dropped a pen in the middle of the book to mark my place. I got up. After walking into the next room, where my computer sat, I roused it, proffered my password, and typed the given address. (Actually, that’s only partly true: before making it to the Web page, I checked my e-mail account, my Twitter account, and my Facebook account. One of these sent me to a very interesting article by a colleague of mine, which I read. Then I ate some cheese.) I spent about half an hour trying to find Deresiewicz’s notes, feeling much like the woman in “To Catch a Thief” who opens her jewel box to find the treasures gone.