How to Be a Know-It-All
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/16/how-to-be-a-know-it-all [www.newyorker.com]
2017-10-21 13:49
What you learn from the Very Short Introduction series.
Some of these books are concise introductions to topics you might later wish to pursue in greater depth: Modern India, say, or Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Others, like “Teeth,” contain pretty much everything the average layperson would ever want or need to know. All of them, however, take their Very Short commitment seriously. The length of each book is fixed at thirty-five thousand words, or roughly a hundred and twenty pages. (See Very Short Introduction No. 500, “Measurement.”)