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Comment by pluijzer | Hacker News Reader

This is the problem I have with long form articles. They are promoted as a counter reaction to short shallow articles without substance. Though most of these long form articles are just as shallow. Starting a articles on physics by the description on how a professor wiped his horn rimmed glasses that shimmered in the morning light only to have them steam up again by his first sip of chocolade brown coffee.

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New-Yorker-style long-form articles are a different reading experience compared to an article intended to deliver factoids. These articles are not meant to just deliver news. They are meant to be immersive and also educational. They end up being long-winded because they paint a more comprehensive picture of a particular topic's history, outlook, and also the proponents and detractors involved. The descriptions of the people are intended to give you sense of their mentality and what drives them to champion or fight the article's topic.

Quality can also vary wildly of course. Tight writing also applies to long-form. You do not want to end up meandering.

At their best, they are art. They’re more than a transfer of raw information. They are an extreme compression format.

Sometimes they fall far short of that goal

I think I agree with you

Agree. It is also the mindset.

If I am reading Gauss, my mind wants to process facts immediately.

If I am reading the New Yorker, my mind would like to wander a bit.

It all depends on what you are reading.

A new yorker style article explaining for loops in a programming language. Yeah nobody wants that.

Coming soon to McSweeney's : Gore Vidal's unpublished memoirs of iterative exhaustion during that summer on Fire Island.

> We met in a north London café lined with books, where he calmly unpacked his concerns about the quantum gravity status quo ...

Nice example. At that point there's a subtle shift in emphasis from quantum gravity as the subject of the article to "my experience talking with a leading quantum gravity researcher" as the subject of an article. What the article is selling is the experience, rather than the knowledge. Which is fine in and of itself, except when that becomes an overly popular pivot and one feels inundated in indirection.

That is fine and quite humane. But sometimes one has to scroll to find the real start of the article.

Do you want an experience, or do you want information? The right writing style is very much dependent on the answer to that question.

False dichotomy. Tight writing produces both. For example, there's a quote about Simenon to the effect of "nobody else can in so few words recreate the entire atmosphere of a time and place (france in the ~30s)".

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