>The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.
Honest question: how do you read books if a 10k word article is too long?
Honest question: how do you read books if a 10k word article is too long?
It's probably something about the nature of reading on a screen, on a device that's capable of fifty zillion other things at the press of a button. When I'm reading a book, there's only the book. Less willpower is required to maintain my focus.
Long blog posts are much easier to read if I send them to my Kindle, but I rarely bother.
Edit: a word
More importantly, dense literary works exist but usually pop essay books are trying to prove a point. SSC essays usually try to make you forget you had a point, and instead go up a meta level in service of his extremely evenhanded let's-all-be-friends persona.
Which conflicts with the pretty bad comment section that always wants to sit around discussing culture war. (Which exists but is not worth quite as much time as they want to put into it.)