Ideas
Nadia Sorel
On the slow death of the long read and why it matters.
Attention is not shrinking. It is just being pointed at the wrong things. That is a very different problem.
The wrong diagnosis
The conventional narrative about attention is that it is shrinking. That the internet and the smartphone and the infinite scroll have collectively reduced our capacity to focus to something approaching the attention span of a goldfish, a comparison that is both widely repeated and completely unsupported by evidence. The actual situation is more interesting and more troubling than a simple reduction in capacity. We have not lost the ability to pay attention. We have built systems that make it extremely difficult to direct it deliberately.
What is actually happening
What is actually happening is a competition for attention that is won by the things optimised for winning it rather than the things worth paying attention to. The short video is not better than the long essay. It is more efficient at triggering the neurological responses that keep you watching. These are not the same thing. The problem is not that people cannot read long pieces. It is that the architecture of the platforms where most people spend their time is designed to make reading long pieces feel like an act of resistance.
What the long read does
The long read does something that shorter forms cannot do. It develops an argument over time. It earns its conclusions rather than asserting them. It allows for complexity and contradiction and the kind of thinking that requires holding two things in tension rather than resolving them prematurely. It creates the conditions for the reader to change their mind, which is one of the more valuable things any piece of writing can do. None of this is possible in a format optimised for speed and shareability.
The writers still doing it
There are writers still doing it. Still producing pieces that require and reward sustained attention. Still treating the reader as someone capable of following a complex argument rather than someone who needs to be retained at all costs. These writers are not hard to find but they are harder to find than they should be. The algorithmic surfaces that most people use to discover writing are not optimised for the long read. They are optimised for engagement, which is a different metric entirely.
What we lose when we stop reading long
What we lose when we stop reading long pieces is not just the pleasure of them. We lose the practice of sustained attention. We lose the experience of following an argument through its full development. We lose the encounter with a writer's complete thinking rather than the extractable highlights of it. We lose the particular kind of understanding that only arrives after you have spent real time with an idea. These are not small losses. They are losses that show up in how we think and argue and make decisions.
Attention is not shrinking. It is just being pointed at the wrong things. That is a very different problem.
The readers who have not given up
There is a significant number of people who have not given up on long form reading and who are actively looking for more of it. These people are not all older. They are not all academics or intellectuals in the traditional sense. They are people who have noticed what the short form diet does to their thinking and have decided, deliberately, to seek out the alternative. This constituency exists. It is underserved. It is the reason publications committed to the long read continue to find their audience.
What this means for writing
If you write, it means continuing to write at the length the piece requires rather than the length the platform prefers. It means trusting the reader to stay with you if you have given them a reason to. It means resisting the pressure to front-load everything and summarise constantly and make the piece as skimmable as possible. It means writing for the reader who is paying attention rather than the one who might not be. That reader exists. Writing for them is worth it.
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About the author
Nadia Sorel
Covers food, ideas, and the stories that sit just underneath the surface of both. Interested in where things come from and what gets lost in the telling. Has strong opinions about markets and no opinions she is willing to keep to herself. Based in Paris, reluctantly.
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