1. Weekend Reading: As they used to say on Monty Python, "...and now for something completely different. A couple of years ago I wrote a paper with this title, "Writing Papers in Economics Using Fake Latex." The article is real. Here is the link onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…
2. The back story for the paper will provide some insights into how faddish and tribal academics can be. Most people outside academics will be surprised how influential the physical appearance of a paper can be to other academics.
3. The "cool kids" in economics and lots of other STEM fields write papers in something called LaTeX. It was originally designed for desktop publishing, and I will be the first to admit that papers produced using this platform have a pleasing aesthetic appearance.
4. LaTeX was developed by a famous computer scientist at Stanford named Donald Knuth. The graphic below is an example of what a paper in LaTeX looks like. 
5. In my own department, PHD students are encouraged to use LaTeX for their dissertation papers. Being a confirmed Microsoft Word user, this presented a major problem. To write in LaTeX you have to basically program as you write. Seems like a giant waste of time to me.
6. Plus you cannot go back and forth between LaTeX and Word easily at all. It is a practical impossibility. You can see the problems this could lead to. I became so frustrated a few years ago that I said there had to be a way around this problem.
7. I discovered an underground community out there that figured out how to "fake" LaTeX using Microsoft Word. Since these ideas were scattered here and there in obscure blogs I decided to write a document pulling it all together. I wanted to see if I could pull off a fake.
8. After showing my fake to a number of colleagues, they urged me to write my formatting "recipe" up into a paper and try to publish it somewhere. You can imagine that something with "Fake LaTeX" in the title was not easy to get published!
9. The Journal of Economic Surveys kindly and finally agreed to publish my paper on how to fake it. The reviews were 100% tribal as you might guess. LaTeX users regarded my faking as an abomination. I was quietly cheered by Word users.
10. Here is a pic of what a fake LaTeX formatted paper in Word looks like. The average person cannot tell the difference between this fake and the real thing.
11. I actually have no problem with anyone who wants to use LaTeX for writing papers. There are some good technical reasons where it shines. However, I object when it is presented as a standard or as a signal for entry into the cool kids club in academics. Mic drop.
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