Ruined by the Stolen Footnotes
Language: en
The night before our final doctoral dissertations were due, I sat at my desk, doing one last routine pass over my girlfriend Chloe’s citations. That was when I saw it. Every single foundational source—the canonical historical texts and peer-reviewed literature underpinning her entire thesis—had been stripped of their original authors. In their place, inserted with clumsy arrogance, was the name of our lab’s golden-boy first-year: Toby. My phone buzzed on the blotter. It was an Instagram notification. I tapped open Toby’s private story, posted only minutes earlier: "Sneaking my name…