Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In hasn’t even been published yet, and already it’s sparked a national conversation about modern feminism. Though worthy, this has obscured the national conversation we should really be having. Lean In exposes a vein of something truly endemic and toxic in our culture. I refer, of course, to the current ridiculous state of the “Acknowledgments” section, which has perhaps reached its nadir in Sandberg’s work. Lean in, and drop a name.

Sandberg is not entirely to blame: As a first time author, she was merely following recent convention. And as a high-achiever, she was merely outdoing everyone else who has written an acknowledgment section in the past few years. Where readers used to see, perhaps, a paragraph thanking the writer’s editor and agent, a few key researchers, and maybe a family member or two, now we are confronted with a chapter-long laundry list of name after name. Sandberg’s seven-and-a-half page section, for instance, thanks more than 140 people for contributing to her 172 page book. She doesn’t just thank her superagent, she thanks her superagent’s boss, Ari Emanuel, “for his friendship as well as his ever-amusing and supportive check-in calls.” She doesn’t just thank her editor, she thanks “Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief of Knopf, whose unflagging support kept this project on the fast track.”

The large bodycount, along with the accompanying exegeses of just how each person helped, makes Lean On seem a more appropriate title. For instance, Sandberg explains that her cowriter, former Spy staff writer Nell Scovell, “put in nights, early mornings, weekends, and holidays,” which sounds rather awful for Scovell, no matter what the pay. (Although Sandberg reveals the importance of Scovell’s work in her mixed-metaphor valentine: “Her heart rings true and clear on this book’s every page.”) She also lets us know that Scovell wasn’t the only person who adjusted her schedule. Harvard Professor Hannah Riley Bowles “interrupted her vacation to spend hours on the phone discussing her work,” a description that was surely meant to express genuine gratitude, but mainly just clarifies the global pecking order. We also learn that childhood friend Mindy Levy scoured many drafts and that this tendency to conscript the semi-willing isn’t new: “And just as she did for so many of my papers for so many years, my college roommate Carrie Weber stayed up many late nights line editing every sentence.”

Lean On might be a more appropriate title for Sandberg's book.

The 140-plus number, by the way, does not double-count the several people Sandberg thanks in multiple places, like Larry Summers, whom she makes sure to note—though she’s already mentioned this in the body of the work itself—“offered to advise my senior thesis, gave me my first job out of college, and has been an important part of my life ever since.” Summers is hardly the most famous person Sandberg mentions, nor is Gloria Steinem, who “has shared her wisdom with me since I was lucky enough to meet her six years ago.” She also mentions, in a single paragraph, Arianna Huffington (“She sent comments on drafts from all around the world, adding her insight and deep understanding of cultural trends”), Oprah Winfrey (whom she texts with, and whose voice Sandberg hears “in my head,” when she’s weighing some challenge, “reminding me of being authentic”), and Gene Sperling (“one of the busiest people I know, and yet he found the time to write page after page of key suggestions”). Draft-readers included Bill McKibben, Don Graham, and Carole Geithner. Name-dropping the spouse of a famous person might be the most powerful namedrop of all, implying a double-date degree of intimacy. It is awfully difficult not to read Sandberg’s acknowledgments sections as a coda to her professional self-help book. It is not just what you know nor is it even who you know: It is how you let the world know who you know.

While Sandberg is the latest egregious example, she’s in good company. E.J. Dionne, a master of the form, tends to include just about every famous person he has ever met in his end pages. “[I]f these acknowledgments are a bit long, I hope the reader will forgive me. It’s because I have a lot of debts to pay,” he writes at the close of Why Americans Hate Politics. (The list is actually very useful in that it offers a much more concise evocation of why Americans hate politics than the book itself: Look no farther than his lengthy list to be reminded of Washington’s much-maligned clubbiness.) Chelsea Clinton was recently thanked in the acknowledgments of Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, and also scattered faux-carelessly amidst the long list of Brooklyn writer types who’d read drafts of Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s A Sense of Direction, suggesting either that Ms. Clinton has a particular interest in highbrow modes of self-discovery, or that those interested in highbrow modes of self-discovery have a particular interest in her. In Al Gore’s The Future, he thanks 73 individuals by name, including Ray Kurzweil (he’s writing about the future, after all), Jared Diamond, E.O. Wilson, and someone named Bill Simmons (no, not that one) who cooked “terrific meals during the innumerable working sessions in Nashville.”