Hello, people who read long-form journalism! Or should I say: people who have ambitions to read long-form journalism. We all want to be committed readers; only a fraction of us actually are. (I could tell you exactly what fraction if I bothered to look up the so-called "clickthrough rate" of this here newsletter. But I prefer to think you're all so charmed by me, and the WIRED long-form-producing machinery generally, that it hovers consistently around, oh, 99 percent. Go team.)
The problem is right there in the very word: long-form. I don't mean the fact that it's (like its near-relation, longread) an awkward journalismoid portmanteau. I mean specifically the "long" part. Long is rarely a virtue. Does anyone want a long anything? Don't be vulgar—I mean temporally. A long commute. A long movie. A long article. These are not exactly enticements.* Even if something is long, it shouldn't feel long. A long life is ideal, of course, but it tends to fly by.
Which is a long way of saying: You should read Laura Kipnis' new long-form article. (We published it a couple months ago, but I was out of town and haven't had a chance to tell you about it until now.) Literally, it's about a new company called Rebind, which Laura was asked to be a part of. Spiritually, it's about our struggle to read long things.
Laura is one of the great living critics and polemicists, and she's written several books. She knows what it means to go long. She also knows that fewer and fewer people are reading long these days. In Rebind she glimpses a possible future, one in which long things might not scare us so much. I won't say more. As I say, you should read the piece. It's not that long.
*Attentive readers of this newsletter will notice that we recently changed the name from Longreads to The Big Story. Big: so much better than long, right?
