The complex, long-form writers – but is anybody listening?

I sympathise with readers who have a short attention span. I myself am one of those. And nowadays, well – that’s pretty much everybody.

And yet, people keep writing long, and very long, articles. Are they wasting their time? Who actually reads these articles?

I used to think that long articles were indeed a waste of time. And in a certain sense, I was right. I came from the angle of an antinuclear activist, and for a long time, the “nuclear debate” was run by highly – informed people, who made sure to use the absolutely correct technical language – no weak slips into ordinary talk. The anti-nuclear experts generally showed their opponents that they were right up there with the jargon that only experts understood. So the ordinary peasant, the general public, including many well-educated people, “dazzled by science” couldn’t really understand the long arguments. The result was that most people were intimidated, felt they could not understand it all. which was exactly the situation that the nuclear lobby wanted.

Then along came Dr Helen Caldicott, and mucked it all up. She understood all the technical stuff, and could write about that. But she also used ordinary, understandable language. And worse – heaven forfend – she sometimes was emotional. God, she even described some nuclear propagandists as “wicked”. Personally, I thought that the term was accurate. Anyway, Dr Caldicott copped a lot of flak, including even from the anti-nuclear lobby, with their obsession about being “respectable”. How dare she be so “hysterical”. But then she couldn’t help it, having the disability of being female.

But, Dr Caldicott, with her many books, public speaking, meeting world leaders, even influencing Ronald Reagan, got her message through to people, and the “debate, has never been the same since.

So, I rejoiced at this development, which did help journalists to loosen up, and cover nuclear issues in a more readable and human way. And in shorter articles.

But now the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of being short and easily digestible, especially with the communications monster of social media. It is a sad thing that probably only old people have the time and the inclination to read long articles.

And people are missing out, because often the full story on a subject is really covered only in long articles. I have a collection of these, on a variety of topics, and I had planned to reference a number of them here. Some are very densely written, full of facts, dates, events – and therefore really informative – but still a bit of hard work to read. And some show how very complex a situation can be – how there are two sides, and maybe more than two, to a story.

So, here are examples of very informative ones:

Planet Plastic: How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades, by Tim Dickinson.

US military action in Iran risks igniting a regional and global nuclear cascade, by Farah N. Jan.

Cumulative effects of radioactivity from Fukushima on the abundance and biodiversity of birds, by Timothy A Mousseau