> Some of the photographs were especially compelling, and I think they'd have had less impact as a sidebar.

To me the point of an article is to provide textual information; I find most of the innovations get in the way of actually getting the info into my brain. (I originally put "innovations" in scare quotes, but they are new ideas, just for me bad ones. But that's the nature of experimentation).

The thing about reading is that, like recognition of 2D images, it's a learned behavior though one (more than image recognition) that appears to hack into some deep structures in the vision system. Breaking the text up like this ironically subverts those mechanisms which likely impedes understanding.

I don't feel like it makes reading interactive, so much as it makes reading laborious. Regardless of the quality, context, or merit of the picture, it's still a large, obtrusive break in the narrative. Paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, and then a couple of long drags on the mouse wheel until the structure resumes. If anything, this actually keeps me from getting hooked as my concentration and attention are being interrupted every couple of minutes. And I don't think this is related to my ripe old age of 34, either. I appreciate what this style of presentation is trying to do; look like a magazine. But reading in a browser is a much more linear experience than a magazine, where text is often in columns that split and resume on the same page; that's a design pattern we have had a century (or more?) to get used to. Further, in a magazine, we usually have the option to ignore the pictures at our leisure, which is simply not an option here. It looks cool, I'll grant that, but it's otherwise a distraction.

This has everything I dislike about documentary videos. But many people like those, are happy to go along with the narrator's pace, absorb the pictures and wait for scraps of information.

The outline.com version posted nearby is to me vastly superior, and an interesting comparison: https://outline.com/e3h5H2

Thankfully someone posted an outline.com link which makes it more readable.