[dsacco]

Offtopic, but I have a really difficult time reading articles like this. I don’t know if this reflects a problem with the style or my ability to focus, but I find it really annoying:

> “SANDHOGS,” THEY CALLED THE LABORERS who built the tunnels leading into New York’s Penn Station at the beginning of the last century. Work distorted their humanity, sometimes literally. Resurfacing at the end of each day from their burrows beneath the Hudson and East Rivers, caked in the mud of battle against glacial rock and riprap, many sandhogs succumbed to the bends. Passengers arriving at the modern Penn Station—the luminous Beaux-Arts hangar of old long since razed, its passenger halls squashed underground—might sympathize. Vincent Scully once compared the experience to scuttling into the city like a rat. Zoomorphized, we are joined to the earlier generations.

This goes on for about seven paragraphs before I have any idea what the article about. I understand “setting the scene” but I can’t tell whether or not to care about an article if it meanders about with this flowing exposition before indicating what its central thesis is.

It seems like a popular style in thinkpieces and some areas of journalism. The author makes a semi-relevant title, provacative subtitle, and five - ten paragraphs of “introduction” that throw you right into the thick of a story whose purpose doesn’t seem clear unless you know what the article is about. Rather than capturing my attention with engaging exposition, I find it takes me out of it. But it must work if it’s so uniquitous; presumably their analytics have confirmed this style is engaging.

[_nothing]

It's not the style-- it's just not good writing, but it's trying so hard to be. It's the kind of thing that would show up in a college writing workshop and hopefully get workshopped into something more intelligible. As they say, "Show, don't tell." The passage describes a lot but not in a way that helps you actually visualize any of it, thus it's really hard to follow.

[tnecniv]

Right, any individual sentence is fine and the idea is probably usable, yet it's not clear how each statement relates to those that came before it.

[sullyj3]

The next sentence afterwards is a monstrosity:

"But, I explained to my work colleagues as the Princeton local pulled out from platform eight and late-arriving passengers swished up through the carriages in search of empty seats, both the original Penn Station and its unlovely modern spawn were seen at their creation as great feats of engineering."

I had to highlight between the commas to get through that one.

[maxxxxx]

It seems growing up with German is a great preparation for such sentences :)

[skybrian]

These complaints about Penn station are also a well-worn cliché.

[subcosmos]

Just imagine ... that some day in the future journalism will be AI based, and will generate entire articles tailored to your viewing habits based on extensive psych profiling and AB testing to maximize clicks and screen time!

The content need not be true, but at least everyone will be happy with their preferred writing styles....

http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

[trisimix]

What if I dont want the content Im most interested in. It'd probably give me the computer scoentost version of tabloid, but I prefer making myself read things that I don't fully grasp.

[falcor84]

That actually sounds quite appealing to me. In recent years I noticed that the writing style of a book had a much bigger part in my ability to derive value from it than its content.

If I could read fiction that is written exactly for me I would love it. And as for "non-fiction", I reference check any particularly interesting claim anyway, so I'd be happy to try and use the AI for that too. The way I see it, reading is much more about exercising the brain in thinking about new things than about learning new facts.

[ppod]

The piece is just overwrought at the sentence level, as in the example below. I think it's partially inspired by trying to sound like an old-style important newspaper columnist, and partially David Foster Wallace. DFWs long sentences are very readable though, because they are conversational, so you can understand them perfectly if you read them as though hearing them aloud.

[sgt101]

The existence of writing like this is why analytics (and attention) are not good ways of deciding if style and subject are "working". Clearly many people hate it - like Garlic - many people hate Garlic; Garlic fails the attention / analytics test. Pop Tarts pass!

And yet a world of Pop Tarts is sooooooo boring... And no one makes heart stoppingly good fish stew using Pop Tarts.

This fella may not have written the best piece of the week, we may not remember this piece tomorrow - but I think that the fact that he's attempting to create something gives him a chance of actually getting there. Looking at a dashboard completely kills that in my opinion.

Screw the stats! Make what you think is good !

[jpttsn]

It’s a remnant from the time when we paid by the bundle for longform content and trusted the issuing brand not to waste our time.

[bamboozled]

Some people enjoy writing and some people enjoy reading. It need not be "to the point" all of the time.

[dsacco]

I should clarify: I don't mind "unfocused" writing like this. I can definitely appreciate a creative take on exposition. But I think the introduction of an article is not the most appropriate place to do it. An upfront paragraph - even a few sentences - explaining what is happening would basically resolve this for me.

[dtornabene]

I actually like the baffler, but I 100% agree. The New Yorker and LRB are similar with the new yorker being far far worse. Its distracting and takes away from the story for me as well, and I love long form journalism.

[blackbagboys]

I appreciate the irony of assuming that the writing style of an article about how data-obsessive engineering cultures strip away the capacity for creative thought and engagement must have been determined by profit-maximizing analytics, especially when the article in question was written for a nonprofit leftist magazine.

[htk]

These convoluted forms of passive voice do make it harder to parse. It’s almost like the polar opposite of Hemingway’s journalistic style.