In a famous New Yorker cartoon, a woman publisher sits behind a desk addressing Charles Dickens and his manuscript, and cheerfully advises: "But think of the SEO if the title actually named the two cities."

“Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.” Ernest Hemingway told George Plimptonin an interview for The Paris Review in 1958. The series was called the “Art of Fiction,” but John McPhee—the wonderful octogenarian, non-fiction author still writing for The New Yorker—writes in his latest article that this most certainly applies to non-fiction as well.