Thinking Inside the (Status) Box, a guest essay by Jo Deurbrouck

The story goes: Ernest Hemingway once convinced a group of dinner companions to bet him $10 each that he couldn’t write a story short enough to fit on a bar napkin.  Hemingway collected their money—and, I’d like to think, stood a round—after scrawling these words: “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”

The bar napkin story is probably a fiction, but that doesn't seem to impact its popularity.  Just now I googled “for sale: baby shoes,” and was rewarded with seven pages of Hemingway hit...