Nostrich

Gentlemen, I have started a blog. Famous last words, to be sure, but I’ve been thinking about and planning and working on this for a while, and I like what it’s ended up looking like. I will tell you all about it, but first some boring meandering in pursuit of a point.

Apparently, there’s a longform renaissance under way and, while I’m proud to be part of it to some degree, I think we’re sort of missing the point. There is no renaissance; Longform has been curating older examples of longform journalism for a while now and they seem to have just about every year since the 50s covered. You could argue the volume has increased but the fact remains: longform journalism never went anywhere.

What is surging is reader interest, and I think that interest is more in smart, thoughtful writing than it is necessarily longform journalism. No doubt longform curators have a lot to do with this, but so do tools like Instapaper and Read It Later, and to say that interest in longform is surging when less than 10% of Read It Later’s users can get through more than a couple thousand words just doesn’t ring true.

Tools like Arianna Huffington and Henry Blodget also have a lot to do with this. As the web’s matured as a content medium, online publishing’s rapid race to the bottom of the barrel has left a pretty sour taste in the mouth of those with triple digit IQs and attention spans longer than ten seconds, and that, apparently, is still a pretty large crowd. So we browse Give Me Something To Read, and we use Instapaper, and we abandon RSS. What people want, it seems, is less shit. And the longform curators, great though they are, fall a little short of really providing that. There’s more to read than 3,000+ word feature articles from the New Yorker.

And that’s the spirit I’m starting this new thing with. Longform curation is great, but sometimes it lacks context. If you didn’t know Hitchens was dead (worse, didn’t know who he was), links to his best essays are pretty useless. Lawrence Wright’s 25,000 word feature on Scientology could be wonderful (spoiler: it is), but why should you care? And wasn’t there some pretty interesting follow-up about the fact-checking process? One of the delights of longform journalism is that it doesn’t need to be relevant or newsworthy, and when you’re losing yourself in 10,000 or more words, you’d probably prefer that it isn’t, so I hope the curators (and, er, me) continue what they’re doing. But sometimes a little context is good, sometimes there’s more to be said, and sometimes I just don’t know what the fuck everyone is talking about and can someone help me out here?

That’s what I’m shooting for with The Syllabi. There’s more to life than longform, and there should be something between 25,000 word epic and 100 words with a slideshow. Sometimes a topic needs a backstory, something a little more comprehensive. I’m choosing to not say too much about the specifics of what I’m going to be doing, because although I’ve been thinking about this for weeks, there’s very much still an element of making it up as I go, but overall my goal is to link to good writing on interesting things that isn’t necessarily a minimum of 5,000 words and has plenty of related reading. I haven’t properly “launched” it yet (waiting until I can afford a domain #ughlife), but I’m ready to show and tell and get some feedback (even if it’s shit, at least it’s pretty). I just posted my first “feature” post, on the NFL’s concussions problem; it has a couple longform reads, but it also has plenty of context, plenty of backstory, and even a little about why you should care about it.