I once read a Briefly Noted review in The New Yorker that revealed that the reviewer had only read a quarter of the book. A friend told me that reviewers got about $100 for those reviews so there was a certain inevitability to this deception. This abstract, of Calvin Trillin’s best-ever article, about an American student who goes to China, blossoms, gets sick, and dies, is another example of the same thing. The abstracter clearly didn’t read the article — but you should.