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. The prose was dry in that specific way academic papers are — three qualifications per sentence, zero stakes, and the authors kept restating things they'd already said. I got to the end of the introduction and realized I couldn't have told you what they actually claimed. I scrolled. The first proof was a page of unmotivated lemmas. I was checking my email in another tab within forty seconds. I closed the paper and told myself I'd come back to it.
