Credit Photograph by Lefteris Pitarakis / AP
Some morsels of print culture—personals, short-form obituaries, movie credits, coupon expirations, terms of use—rush by us, unread and unloved, until suddenly, for one reason or another, we care. Footnotes are among those things. The underworld of notes, indexes, and appendices, which book publishers ineloquently call “back matter,” lacks both a good story and the glamour of the main event. Notes seem to beg, by every standard, to be overlooked. But then your needs change, and, when they are gone, you miss them.

 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.
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