I can predict when an author is about to plagiarize me, and poorly so when he writes that Taleb “popularized” the theory of Black Swan events.* Newspaper readers exposed to real prose are like deaf persons at a Puccini opera: they may like a thing or two while wondering, “what’s the point?” Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.
