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Thanks to this little novel, in a few months I met several young journalists whose friendship I retain to the present day. One day, one of them asked me to write an article on the subject of a conversation we had had, warning me that he only had space for just four thousand words. I never imagined that, for the misery of so many readers, that one would be the first article of many hundreds I have published to date. Occasionally I find that many of them have been republished in newspapers and magazines, sometimes erroneously signed by others. I usually just need to read two sentences to see if I or someone else wrote it, even when it is a fifteen-year-old article. I normally always excuse these errors but I strongly object, with some success, when I find my name on items that I never wrote. It is not good to kidnap merits or take the blame for the follies of others.

At the end of the century, you could still find short articles of four or five thousand words in nonacademic publications. Soon I could feel, beyond just understanding, the educational benefit of reducing long essays to this number, which at first seemed so greedy.