One of the best books I have read this year is Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller. To explain the counterintuitive suggestion of its title, Miller romps through the story of how early biologists first came up with their taxonomic categories, showing how seemingly sterile decisions about classification are, in fact, human stories involving deep character flaws that changed language, science, and history. The life of the scientist David Starr Jordan introduces us to how this thing we all think we know exists in the world, “fish,” is really just an abstract philosophical theory — and a bad one. It gets easier to let go of “fish” as a taxonomic category the more you learn about how little each slimy, scaled, swimmer species actually has to do with the others evolutionarily and the historical misassumptions made in the process.

I mention this because it demonstrates just how hard it is to make a compelling abstract metaphysical argument that some apparent thing doesn’t exist. In most cases, if you tell people some ordinary word is secretly meaningless, you’ll fail, and you’ll deserve to. Yet, this didn’t stop the staff of the New Yorker’s union from making an even more counterintuitive argument than Miller’s — declaring that editing itself does not exist. In a letter to the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, the union argued: