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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one thinks that The New Yorker takes 5 pages to give 1 page of information? Their articles are so frustrating to read!

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The New Yorker is a literary magazine, not an encyclopedia. If you're reading it purely for gathering information, I suggest the Wikipedia article [1] or Luria's book itself instead. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Shereshevsky

[2] http://arteflora.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Luria-The-Mi...

I've always wished "long form" articles would put an abstract at the beginning.

Me too.

I even tried to see if such a "summary" would be a viable business: https://github.com/simonebrunozzi/MNMN/blob/master/Weekly-Su...

No, no, no, there's literature and then there's literature that gets paid by the word and has to be written fast. I'm sure they never met an adjective they didn't like. I get it, people need to make a living but it is still frustrating to read.

Literature does not have to be fluff. One of the best non-fiction books I've read that's both informative and has beautiful writing is, "On Immunity: An Inoculation " by Eula Biss. It's both informative and a pleasure to read.

Am I the only one thinks that The New Yorker takes 5 pages to give 1 page of information

I’m pretty sure The New Yorker thinks that. It’s called “literature”, and a lot of it is pretty good. Sounds like you’ll want to stay away from Russian authors, though.

“Literature” is definitely not the opposite of “concise.”

Good thing, too, because that wasn’t my point. If you want the TL;DR, The New Yorker probably isn’t for you. It is, of course, more nuanced than that and leaving less room for snapping one-liner comebacks, but such is the world of low attention spans that we live in.

True but the point of literature is not just to deliver factual information as quickly as possible.

By analogy, you can drive to the top of Mt. Washington, but people still hike it. Either way will deliver the view from top, but each will be a distinct experience.

I think Michael Crichton is a good example of this. He has (had) an incredibly terse style that still manages to communicate quite a lot of information/imagery.

Exactly, literature can be both artful and to the point or at least insightful.

I think a lot of Russian authors are pretty to-the-point. Turgenev, Chekhov and Tolstoy come to mind, as opposed to e.g. Gogol who has a more playful style and can write pages about anything and everything.

Tolstoy’s best-known work is the poster child for long reads, and at the forefront of my mind when I wrote the sentence. I feel I’m being trolled. :-)

I didn't know we were discussing "long" I thought it was about writing 5 pages on something that can be written in 1 page (did you read OC?). I would say Tolstoy's writing style cannot be characterized as such. Tolstoy's work are long but they cover a whole lot, information density is very high.

I, and I think probably many others, would disagree. Tolstoy is a lot of things, but to-the-point is not one of them.

As a friend one remarked, "The New Yorker makes fiction out of nonfiction."

What's your hurry, friend?

The inevitable march of death?

Ugh don’t remind me.

You're able occasionally to forget? Lucky you!

Am I the only irritated by these inevitable questions from people with no sense of literary craft any time an article from the New Yorker is posted on HN?

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