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This is the problem I have with the recent surge of popularity of "long-form" articles. Most are long on form, but short on content. People get excited about this form of writing (often pulling in whole ideology of distraction-free reading), but I find it hard to get excited when the actual meaning is scarce.

I don't have that problem with good books, so don't put me in the "modern civilization problems" drawer.

Many years ago (10+), back when printed media was still relevant in IT, I used to work for a local computer magazine whose senior editor was this witty, funny guy with a sharp mind - an unlikely case of a bohemian, post-modernist poet actually managing to do serious journalism. On tech topics no less.

With this being printed media, "long-form" was more or less the norm for the more in-depth article, and space requirements were very strenuous: you had exactly this much space to fill, no more, no less [1].

But we were explicitly encouraged to choose topics for which "this much space" was meaningful (for those of my colleagues who didn't get to choose their topics, like the hardware folks who had to write about whatever was happening, the choice of topic and assigned space went hand in hand). Sometimes, I'd choose to cover two or three things in the space that was given to me in order to avoid writing pretentious equivalents to Lorem ipsum so as to fill in the page.

I fondly remember the stern, to-the-point feedback that we'd get from our senior editor. A draft of this article would have probably received a feedback like "twice longer than it needs to be. Make it shorter, send me pics."

The gist was that there was no such thing as "long-" or "shortform". What you wanted was exactly-as-long-as-it-needs-to-be-form. Some points require many words to convey. Some don't. It's being selective in your verbalization that draws the line between eloquence and hypergraphia. The entire "I am an optimist" section is an unfortunate example of that.

1. Most of us weren't exactly experienced journalists though, so filling "this much space" was often achieved with a lot of help from the heroic DTP team, which basically survived on coffee during the last week of an edition.

My father once described Malcolm Gladwell as "that man who writes books that should be essays". I think that also sums up my feelings about this.

A particular bugbear of mine is when a non-fiction article starts by describing the weather or somesuch. If the opening line is "It was a warm summer's day when Joshua first..." then I just give up then and there.

There's no glory in padding.

Was it padding? In ASOIAF the description of the scene is one of the only hints George R.R. Martin gives us of when a chapter happens. The moon and a comet provide a number of time references in the books.

> If modern writers have such disrespect for their audience

As opposed to whom, paid-by-the-word Dickens and his amazing menagerie of circumlocutions? ;-)

Touché!

Perhaps, but the further back you go, the starker the shift in reading habits becomes. I skimmed this article in 5 minutes and probably won't remember it tomorrow. Compare two centuries ago, when the only books most people had were the Bible and Milton, and they memorized every word. Or three centuries before that, when the people who could read might have to travel across Europe to read a particular book, and might commit each page to a memory palace.

>>Older, serious, and timeless literature requires deep concentration because the authors use their thousands of words to express deep pathos that can't be trivialised. It takes practice to commit oneself to a book like that for long enough to get into a flow wherein it can be understood and appreciated.

Literature that must be studied to be understood, that must be decoded, that the author spent years on, cramming endless meaning into every last sentence...

This is not fun to read and never has been, even before the age of digital distraction. I don't aspire to read 'great works' that can only be decrypted if you have a degree in literature, in fact I don't think that sort of literature is objectively any good at all - it self-limits, it speaks only to the cognoscenti, and misses out on speaking to everyone else.

I disagree. If there is one thing that is effectively endless is books to read. If you read one book per week for you entire life you would barely scratch the surface. This means that there is an incredible variety of books ranging from the fun entertaining page-turners those books that you "need a degree" to understand.

The thing is, just because a book has a higher entry barrier (and a higher payoff) doesn't mean that it is objectively bad because it doesn't appeal to everyone. Maybe it's not for you, but it can certainly be appealing to many people who enjoy delving into a book and analysing if and so on. I don't have an English degree so I probably won't be arsed to put it the effort to read Finnegans Wake or whatever. But I certainly enjoy reading and analysing boss with more depth than DaVinci's Code.

The same thing happens with games. Maybe you have no interest learning chess, and prefer to play Angry Birds because it gives instant payoff with little effort. And that's fine. But it doesn't mean that chess is "objectively inferior" because there is depth to it enough to study full-time for a lifetime. Same thing happens with music, and any art form, I guess.

We shall have to agree to disagree then.

Literary analysis doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. The enjoyable part of the reading experience for me is engaging with the picture it paints, with the world it posits and the characters it places within it. I certainly enjoy reading books with more depth that The DaVinci Code, but I can think of little that would interrupt my enjoyment of reading more than stepping back and analysing 'clever' sentence structures.

I occasionally enjoy strategic board-games, in order to understand the emergent rules of play that come from the board and given rules. That said I have never really bothered with chess. I don't think chess is objectively inferior to other games though, I don't think the two are equivalent. Literature with deliberate, designed density of meaning comes across as intentional obfuscation rather than simple complexity.

You make valid and understandable points, I think, but I'd still like to expose my point of view, as I read mostly "classics", interrupted by the occasional piece of non-fic.

I'm not really into stopping my reading to take notes and analyze sentence structures either. However, I deeply enjoy it when the author uses fiction to express complex ideas about society, philosophy and human life in general. I enjoy that I can feel these themes happen through the character development, and the author's thesis come though as the plot advances.

For some especially heavy reads though, this might not happen so organically and that's when it stops feeling like enjoying a good read, and feels more like trying to understand Kant, sentence by sentence. I don't think at this point in my life I'd enjoy Joyce much, either (though I've heard Portrait is somewhat more accessible).

However I do find that the more I read, the more enjoyable I find reading novels with complex themes and such. Practice, I guess, and I find it very rewarding. Just start with something that's not too hard and go from there.

I just can't remember where, but a couple weeks ago I read an editorial in a paper that was about how, historically, fiction has been so much better at expressing "subversive" ideas and bringing them out in the culture. Just think about the thinkers of the French Revolution.

That's why I enjoy good fiction :)

I don't think we're all that far off from each other in the end, I probably just have a higher tolerance for trashy sci-fi than you do!

Complexity is not synonym with intentional or unnecessary obfuscation. The latter is just a silly way to create needless barriers to the understanding of the work.

I'd like to say that I can't speak much for books. Like I said I don't read heavy classics nor do I spend dozens of hours analysing a text, but I sometimes do with music. Part of the pleasure I get from listening to classical music is from the aesthetic beauty and pleasantness of the sound, but a larger part is perhaps from re-listening to it and analysing it and discovering new things and meaning in the music. I have pieces that I have listened probably over 50 times, and still I can find new intricacies, or read an analysis that calls my attention to details I have missed, or simply just marvel at the ingenuity of some passage, etc.

For me, analysis isn't a boring procedure that sucks the fun out of art. Much to the contrary, it enhances and deepens my experience beyond what I would have by reading the book/listening to the piece and then putting it aside forever.

>> Complexity is not synonym with intentional or unnecessary obfuscation.

Certainly not, no, which is why I see a difference between the complexity of chess and the obfuscation that goes into some high literature.

I am not a huge fan of Medium.com, it has way too less content displayed per screen, way too huge font and one has to scroll all the way down to read anything, it is annoying , not to mention the huge images everwhere, which gives the images more importance than the content.

Agreed. Are there any websites that you really like the presentation?

I had read Sam Altman's blog on postheaven, I really liked that blogging platform, it is clean with more focus on the text content rather than the pictures.

I completely agree with your point. It seems to me that a vast number of authors/writers (especially apparent in journalists here in Norway) fetishize their own voice, and become so enamored with it that they neglect their actual subject matter.

I don't want to read your irrelevant anectode or clever ironic remark, I want to learn about the subject you promised me.

In an age where communication platforms are so readily abundant and (relatively) easily accessible, people aren't forced to write economically. Contrast this with even fifty years ago when in order to get more than a handful of people to read your work, it had to be published in some way.

out of curiosity (seriously) which were the 5?

Ha! To be honest, I now can't even remember - and it's only a day later, so perhaps the true answer is zero.

There was some stuff about speed of dopamine response that was interesting. It aligned with some stuff about dopamine addiction by a guy called Charles Faraone who I'd been reading on Quora.

I did find his proposed solution interesting, but I'd have preferred it stated up front and then explained, rather than left until the final paragraphs by which point I'd lost attentiveness anyway.