It’s really hard for me to read a WIRED article for information.
I mean I realize that’s not what it’s there for but it takes forever to get into the content of the article.
Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say.
I've found this is the style of American long-format journalism in general. Just look at something like The New Yorker: not to dispute the quality of their writing, but the word counts certainly skew high. Articles in comparable British publications tend to be a lot more succinct.
When I lose track while reading an article, or find difficult to understand it, I stop and reading it bottom up, one paragraph at a time. First the last paragraph, then the one before that, etc...
This cuts through directly to the conclusion, then the detailed explanations form particular to general (which works better for me) and I can skip the "excitement build up" at the top of the article.
I applied it to this[1] super long winded article in New Yorker to get the gist of the article. This article is littered with these passages and it's super frustrating. In the end from my view point it's a shallow piece with very little new insights. FWIW the article didn't age well as India is being ravaged by the 2nd wave.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-p...
Good news articles should tell you everything in the headline. Then tell you everything again in the first body sentence. Then tell you everything again in the first paragraph. and the first page. And so on.
It's supposed to be a fractal that unfolds additional detail as you press forward, while ensuring that even a casual reader comes away with a mostly complete and accurate understanding of the issue.
More of THAT please.
And yet, news media are the last place you're likely to find articles written in this style. Somehow, they manage to deliver the exact opposite of what they should be. A fractal of confusion, recursively unfolding noise.
(It's as if they were making a lot of money on maximizing the time a reader is engaged with any given article. It's as if - and I know this sounds crazy - the articles were there just to hold the user down, while they're being exposed to something else...)
Narrow (succinct) at the top and broad (detailed) at the bottom seems like a normal pyramid to me.
An "inverted pyramid" would be like one of those poems that describes fine details first and only in the last sentence reveals what it's been describing.
I don't doubt that it's actually called that, but it seems backwards to me.
It is ordered most relevant to least.
Practices which show contempt for the reader's time and interest are ultimately counterproductive.
The first is because, yes it allows busy readers to access the most salient facts first. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly from the point of print newspaper production, it allowed subs to always cut from the bottom, without having to read the whole piece carefully...
Newspapers would go through several editions throughout the night as new stories came in or existing stories were expanded. What started life as a front page lead might find itself moved to page three and progressively shortened, possibly down to a 1 sentence news-in-brief NIB.
The pyramid style let subs always fit a story into the available space, simply by cutting everything progressively from the bottom.
This story in Wired is not a news story and is not written as a news story. It is a feature story and its construction follows different rules.
It's a very good feature story, in my opinion.
I'm not accusing you of doing this on purpose, but there's a certain amount of equivocation in the phrase "news article" there. Yes, that's a style that is recommended for factual news articles in a newspaper context, but that's not the only form of "news article".
Call this a "news essay" instead and give it its own style and it might make more sense. It's been around for a long time. Could call it the 20th-century equivalent of clickbait and probably not be far off.
"There's an exciting revolutionary change to physics coming... but first, the full life story of the thesis advisor's influential father... keep reading...."
Arguably it's more a form of entertainment than information.
No novel is allowed to lollygag around the point its trying to achieve in the way these articles flagrantly waste your time.
It's like someone misunderstood that the act of moving your eyes along the page is not interesting in and of itself.
With barely less than a second's though: Watership Down, a hugely popular novel in the 1970s, spends untold amounts of text/paper immersed in detailed descriptions of the flora that the characters are moving through or eating.
Why not just say "I don't enjoy this style of writing", rather than trying to come up with some supposedly objective metrics for how other people should write?
The distinction can be quite arbitrary, but it usually does stand out.
Herman Melville and Neal Stephenson also come to mind. In nonfiction, John McFee.
I'll also frequently apply this to HN comment streams.
1. Collapse the top comment. It's frequently good, but also frequently is an avalanche of compounded hot takes.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the discussion. Odds are that comments are lower-quality, but not always. I collapse these as I go up, upvoting the underrated ones. Occasionally comment.
3. If there's a long stream of lower-quality / redundant comments, I'll collapse those as well.
I really wish there were some way to surface more deeply-nested, high-quality comments. There isn't. (Though occasionally an email to mods will elevate one to a top-level comment.) There used to be a periodic HN curation. That no longer occurs AFAIU.
However, almost every article follows such a predictable format: Introductory section, full of all the interesting and tantalizing details, and stuff you actually want to find out about. Then section two: we jump back to the main subject's childhood, what clothes they were wearing when the journalist met up with them, how softly they speak. About two pages of biographical content. Section 3: we jump to the background of the story we're actually going to tell. Explain how it fits into the history of some movement or scientific question or whatever. The "point" of the article gets buried somewhere in sections 4 or 5, in between riffing on other people's dead ends and more biographical content.
Here's a counterexample literary trainwreck from the BBC. Have a go at wading through this horror show. It appears to have been written deliberately to withhold the topic of the article from the reader, for as long as possible. The wholly uninformative title is just the beginning. Those with the necessary patience will eventually realise that the title is also plainly untrue.
You’ll see a pretty high correlation between fans of “long form”, readers of The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and political inclination around being perceived as erudite.
It’s one of those cargo cult mixed with a measure becoming a target.
https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1391111720526024708
Credentials: https://www.colorado.edu/chemistry/jose-luis-jimenez
Wired: EARLY ONE MORNING, Linsey Marr...
OP article: A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection ... Linsey C. Marr (in the author list)
Wired: . At one point, Lidia Morawska,
OP Article: Lidia Morawska (first listed author)
https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1391111720526024708?s...
It's 100 tweets long, may be more readable here : https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1391111720526024708.html
The physics of small particles moving in the air ("Brownian motion") was completely figured out by Einstein back in 1905.
Given a virus' size and weight, it should be trivial for a physics graduate student to simulate how long it will be airborne.
And so medicine is understandably a slow moving science, and the practice of medicine moves even slower as it represents the slow filtration of the cutting edge of medicine the science, through a complex web of human interaction. Which with a dash of “social capital” theory, makes it easy to see why we have unfortunately often ignored sound advice like this. The mistaken assumptions of people viewing a person who’s expertise bridges two disparate fields, as being unable to understand things as deeply, clearly or fully, as the people dedicated to just one of those fields.
FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.
The #coronavirus is mainly transmitted through droplets
generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes or
speaks.
To protect yourself:
-keep 1m distance from others
-disinfect surfaces frequently
-wash/rub your hands
-avoid touching your Eyes Nose Mouth
The WHO gave a lot of bad advice. Some say that it was intentionally misleading. Promoting ventilation as a reasonable treatment for the initial stages of covid-19 was the worst possible advice to give front-line medical practitioners who didn't know what they were dealing with.
We now know that the fecal-aerosol route of transmission is very important. Forbes has a recent piece about the fecal-oral/aerosol route: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/03/22/pre... Another tweet by ... someone was about how the masks effectively aerosolize droplets.
Keeping bathrooms open but requiring face coverings was an exercise in futility.
In the case of COVID-19, the WHO seems to have implemented #PrasadsLaw [0]. "Prasad’s Law: Medical goods and services that concentrate wealth can be paid for; medical goods and services that disperse wealth are “unaffordable.”"
How long it remains airborne is beside the point. Does that physics grad know how long/if the virus can survive once it dries up? Do they know how long it will survive exposure to light? Do then know whether the virus can cling to dust particles?
Even brownian motion is only half the story. Does the physics grad understand airflow in office spaces? Do they understand how fast air moves when a person coughs? How much turbulence is caused by opening an office door? Plenty of things can stay airborne for extended periods because of aerodynamics without regard to brownian motion (snow/rain/dust/salt etc). That physics grad better come with minors in aerodynamics, kinesiology, microbiology ... even some basic meteorology would be helpful.
You can make the same arguments for drinking water, and yet, as long as you follow the rules, it is unbelievably safe, despite the fact that no one gave a shit about turbulence along the baffles in the treatment tank.
> Given a virus' size and weight, it should be trivial for a physics graduate student to simulate how long it will be airborne.
This is also in the article, known research from decades ago. Social distancing is in fact based on a misunderstanding and conflation of a few things in that early research.