this is like tick-tock sports reporting, but for social media. it’s just as inane and has the trappings of news, including even a quote from the source, with standard attribution:

“Our followers love cheese, anything with cheese, and the more melted and gooier the better,” said Skylar Ganz, 20, who goes to John Jay College in Manhattan.

and a picture!

checks out

Everybody who has a chip on their shoulder about long nonfiction seems to make this argument—that places like Longform and Longreads, and Twitter generally, fetishize the “long” part, when isn’t it obvious that there’s nothing intrinsically good about lots of words? Didn’t Hemingway or Mark Twain or some other blowhard genius once say something like “Sorry for the long letter—I didn’t have time write a short one”?

What nobody seems to ever say is that long articles, by virtue of their length, are able to do something that short articles, by virtue of their shortness, can’t do. What makes the best longform nonfiction so good is the exact same thing that makes the best longform fiction so good—it creates a world in which important stuff happens to people you care about. But it’s just not possible to come to care about somebody new—to meet, fall for, doubt, and root for them—in the span of 500 words.

The 500-word version of a story just doesn’t soak in your head the same as the 5,000-word version. And to see this you need only think about any short fiction you’ve ever enjoyed. Why did you enjoy it? Could you have enjoyed it at 500 words, instead of the 10,000 to 20,000 it probably was?

Good writing shows instead of telling—reading it feels more like living than listening. The trouble is that you can’t get much living done in 500 words. Or at least it’s not the same kind of living you can get at length. Here I’m thinking for example of the astonishing “Crossing”, a short story I read a couple years ago. It’s actually short by short story standards (3,500 words), but it’s long enough. The climax hit me so hard, and the reason it hit me is because I’d been with this dad and his son, and growing to care about them, for like two days and two nights of story-time before the main climactic thing happened.

This is why people write long nonfiction: They want to have characters, places, and ideas live in your head awhile, long enough so that they come to feel like your people & places & thoughts—your world—so that when important stuff happens, you think it’s important too.

It’s pretty obvious that for certain kinds of writing—like this annotation, for one—you usually don’t want people immersed in your world. These words I’m typing even now are wasting precious moments of your life. Instead you want your reader to pop in, absorb your point, and pop right out again.

But to say that “people don’t read stories for their length, but in spite of it” is to conflate radically different genres and to miss one of the key mechanisms by which a certain kind of writing works its magic.