I can do this myself! "On a bald September day, a man walks into a barber shop, languishes at the occupied seats, and voilà, while sensing upcoming bowel movements, he discovers the next great theory of economics."
The purpose of longform writing is to provide flavour and context, which are important parts of an information diet. Not everything has to be about the freshest facts delivered to your brain as urgently as possible. Just because you've happened across this in a frenzied binge of clicking HN headlines, doesn't mean it was designed to be consumed that way. If you don't feel you have time to sit through a New Yorker article, save it for later.
Not always what you're looking for but it can be a good way of cracking into a subject you're unfamiliar with, or a good way of merging the human element with something that would otherwise be quite dry.
By no means a substitute for regular news, but a good complement to it.
Clearly a matter of opinion whether it's good.
You mean it can be a good way of stretching an article to fit more ads and increase monetization.
Long form is good if you have something long to say. Trying to construct a story where there isn't one frustrates the reader.
I enjoy in depth exposes, but I don't need the alice, bob and malory viewpoint anchoring.
This is my general attitude towards this style of writing, not this specific piece.
> Just one piece of general advice from a writer has been very useful to me. It was from Colette. I was writing short stories for Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time. I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them and I tried again and tried again. Finally she said, “Look, it is too literary, always too literary.” So I followed her advice. It’s what I do when I write, the main job when I rewrite
> I: What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?
> Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5020/the-art-of-fi...
When I see a five page article, I know that I'll get background information and I might discover something I didn't expect from the title. While you might only be looking for the study results, I like spending my Sunday afternoon reading long articles teaching me all kinds of interesting information I wouldn't have looked up on my own.
The New Yorker is known for that style, it may even be the prime example of it.
People who don't like that style are not the audience. And there are many people who like it.
It's like asking why Linux Weekly News never runs poetry. Because it's not that kind of publication.
(Or worse - being unable to appreciate a good novel because you're too impatient for it to get to the exciting bits!)
Alternately, it's a way of expanding readership. If you don't know anything about molecular biology, they have to write an article at a layperson's level to explain what they mean. But if you, the reader, don't want to go through the effort of trying to understand even that, then there's this human-interest stuff that may still cause you to decide to buy their magazine.
In French, “logorrhée”, means literally “verbal diarrhoea”.
It’s symptomatic of people who have not much to say.
The thing is, this isn't news reporting at all. It's a popsci writeup of the history of the immune system, the history of the discovery of the immune system and a glimpse into its complexity that uses Covid news as the textual equivalent of a cover image. If you have a print of 20000 Leagues under the Sea and the cover shows the kraken attack, would you complain about the number of chapters that don't contain a kraken at all?
It's journalists writing for other journalists.
George Orwell is turning in his grave...