The paper was open in the second browser tab. I'd been meaning to read it. I scrolled past the abstract, looked at the first section header, started reading — and two paragraphs in the authors just asserted, as if it were already understood, that the standard result I'd been teaching for years was wrong. Not wrong-in-some-limit, just wrong. I stopped. Blinked. Reread the sentence to make sure I hadn't misparsed. I had not misparsed. Something in my chest tightened — not curious, not yet; just the sudden jolt of a ground-level belief being contradicted. I did not keep reading. I closed the tab and opened the prior literature to check whether I had, in fact, been wrong about this for years.
