When most reporters cover the annual Modern Language Association national convention, they generally play it as a long feature on a fringe group of zany English professors but this approach belies the cross section of academic humanity that descends upon these annual confabs. “These days, the MLA counts more than thirty thousand members, of whom ten thousand tend to show up for the annual convention,” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in The Believer. “MLA membership, like academia itself, is weighted toward the East Coast, so conferences in California are not as well attended: only eighty-seven hundred professors were coming to San Diego.”...