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We Have Stopped Reading Long Things, and This Is a Long Thing About It

11 points · November 2026 · 1 response · 75 comments

a note from the writer

Two drafts in, and I still cannot make it short. That is rather the point.

I am going to make an argument that is undermined by its own length, and I am going to make it anyway, because the alternative is to make it short, and short is the problem.

The argument is this. Somewhere in the last fifteen years we stopped reading long things — not stopped being able to, but stopped choosing to, which is worse, because it is a choice that feels like a fact. We say nobody reads long things any more the way we say it rains a lot here. As though the weather did it.

The weather did not do it. We did it, and we did it in a series of small reasonable decisions that added up to an unreasonable one.

Here is how it went, for me. First the newspaper, which I stopped buying because it was all online, and online I read the headlines and the first paragraph, because that is what the page shows you and what the page shows you is what you read. Then magazines, which I stopped subscribing to because I never finished them, and I never finished them because I had stopped buying the newspaper and had lost the habit of sitting with print. Then books, which I did not stop reading but started reading differently — twenty pages, then the phone, then twenty pages — so that a book took a month and a month is long enough to forget the beginning.

Then the phone itself, which is where I read now, and which is very good at short things and very bad at long ones, not because the screen is small but because the phone is a place where something else is always about to happen. You cannot read a long thing in a place where something else is about to happen. You can only read the start of it.

I want to be precise about what was lost, because it is easy to be vague and sound like a person complaining about the young. What was lost is not attention. I have as much attention as I ever had. What was lost is the willingness to give it in advance — to commit an hour to something before knowing whether it would be worth an hour. The short thing lets you decide as you go. The long thing asks you to decide first.

And that asking is the whole value. A long piece of writing is a wager the writer makes on the reader's patience, and a wager the reader makes on the writer's competence, and neither can be settled until the end. The wager is the relationship. When we read only short things, we read only things that have already proved themselves in the first paragraph, which means we read only things that put their best sentence first, which means we read things built like advertisements.

This is not an argument for length as a virtue. Most long things should be shorter. It is an argument for length as a possibility — for keeping open the option that something might need three thousand words and that a reader might give them. Once the option closes, it closes for writers too. Nobody writes what nobody will read. The short thing wins not because it is better but because it is the only thing still being written.

Somebody will point out that I am making this argument on a website, on a screen, to people on their phones. I know. I am also making it at length, on a site that ranks pieces by votes, where a piece this long will be voted on mostly by people who have not finished it. That is the experiment. If you are reading this sentence, the experiment has gone better than the thesis predicts.

I do not have a fix. I have a practice, which is that I read one long thing a week on paper, with the phone in another room, and I do not let myself stop before the end even when the thing is bad, because stopping is the habit I am trying to unlearn and a bad long thing is the best practice for it. I have read some very bad things this way. I have also read the best thing I read last year, which I would have abandoned on page four on a screen, and which did not become good until page forty.

Page forty. That is the number. That is what we have stopped getting to.

If you have got this far: thank you, and I would like to know what page forty of something was for you. Not on the wall — a wall is for short things, and rightly. Write it as a piece. Make it long.

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