Kept out of sight in this rogue essay is the classic question: Who's your audience?
If you're writing for yourself (and maybe a very small number of equally erudite readers) cut loose! Embrace "anfractuous density and heedless flamboyance." But if you're trying to change people's minds, or share knowledge widely, everything in this essay is defiantly at odds with what's necessary to get the rest of the world to pay attention.
What's interesting to me is that the examples he gives are beautiful because of their sincerity. Even if there is artifice, or they're being formal or playful, their style reflects their reading, their shared culture and of course as you say their audience - which I think for them was a very small elite.
Anyone who writes in a flamboyant style now - as the essay's author does - necessarily comes across as a kind of pastiche. There is something camp or affected about it. Maybe that can change. Maybe a new flamboyance can develop. But I think his antiquated style of flamboyance is unlikely to come back to real life.
Take a copy of "Usage and Abusage" and blend with Lord Byron after applying suitable libations; toss in the bear for body. Season to taste with the darker dictionary (the parts chained down to protect the reader). Simmer over a fire of coked Latin and Greek primers, scented with a whiff of lilac.
> Anyone who writes in a flamboyant style now - as the essay's author does - necessarily comes across as a kind of pastiche. There is something camp or affected about it
Necessarily? Not at all. I am not sure where “camp” or “affected” come into it. I am a nerdy English bloke and I suppose Americans, Canadians and Australians etc., will assume I am camp (which troubles me not one bit) so I may be unable to accurately judge, but I didn’t get either from this. It reminded me more of Fry or Lewis than Self, put it that way.
I fully disagree. It is immensely readable (even if you might want an inline dictionary, something afforded by every contemporary operating system and eBook reader).
I think that in 2026, if you really want someone to read something, there should be some evidence that you wrote it. That means being brave and using your powers, whether they are misspelled, ungrammatical, or ornate.
There is guidance to strike a balance here, but there’s also encouragement to aim for beauty. Is his audience everyone, no, but it might be everyone who really wants to know.
Strunk and White can shove it, anyway, but then I am English. Plain language has enormous value in officialdom, insurance, law and finance, and it should be the goal, hence Crystal Mark etc.
But great writing is often audacious, and sometimes that means being ornate.
does anyone need to get the 'rest of the world' to pay attention? That's already a crowded market of questionable characters.
There's something ironic and self-defeating in trying to write to the whole world while also having such a low opinion of the whole world that a writer thinks they can't express themselves the way they want to or lose their audience.
As DBH says at the end of the essay, don't write down to what you presume to be the level of your readers, that's insulting to both you and your readers.
Can we roll back the debate a little? If I'd said "wider audience" instead of "rest of the world," we could explore the question of scope more amicably.
I've been at two memorial services in the past six months where Mary Oliver's poetry has brought consolation and closure to people who needed it. Her choice of words is deceptively simple. A public-school 10th grader can follow along.
Could she go deeper with a much richer vocabulary? Perhaps. Is she most effective -- and surprisingly subtle -- with the words she chooses? You bet. And what's true for Mary Oliver also is true for highly admired (and read!) historians, technical writers, etc. For me, at least, there's great power in simplicity.
Well that's terrible advice. Of course you have to make assumptions about your readers. Highlights Magazine has a different readership than The New Yorker.
When I see what passes for modern writing, be it genre fiction, non-fic for the general audience, or even the literary, I'm not sure I want to appeal to, convince, or share knowledge with them.
> True, some readers become indignant at their own inability to follow prose of any complexity or to recognize words any more obscure than those they are accustomed to using when talking to their dogs.
I do think that there is value in using precise, obscure words to convey precise, obscure knowledge (as with Hart's pogonotrophy example).
However, if all critique is dismissed as the indignation of swine, then how will anyone holding that position ever be able to tell whether they are just a bad writer?
Hart suggests that they should critique themselves, or rely on the critiques of those who write in the same way as they do. I am a programmer though, not an author. But I know that only accepting reviews from those I consider accomplished enough, and ignoring reviews by others as if they were indignant at their own inability to comprehend my code, is a very dangerous path to walk.
I don't think I would dismiss all critique as the indignation of swine. Previously valid criticism came in the form of review, be it from peers or the establishment, and while there might be a broader conversation to be had regarding the current state of literary review some voices probably have merit, I'm not familiar enough to know which, but would welcome recommendations from anyone that happens to read this.
I suspect most are drowned out by indignant squealing.
Re: code. I want to address you twice.
1. "ignoring reviews by others as if they were indignant at their own inability to comprehend my code", yes because doing so means ignoring your manager (hah).
2. Code review is very difficult to get right, the question I ask myself is whether I trust the individual to approach the repo without prejudice to the method or the author, I would think the ignorant would be reluctant to post a review lest their ignorance be broadcast to the team.
> yes because doing so means ignoring your manager
Oh luckily I've been blessed with managers who don't code or do code reviews, so I lucked out there, haha.
But I'll admit that code review is actually not the best comparison, as my PRs don't get reviews from thousands of people from the public - only from other engineers. So I suppose that's actually an argument in favor of Hart.
Kept out of sight in this dismissive comment is the pressing question: What year is it?
Up until four years ago, your notion of "what's necessary" was the law of the land. Starting from sometime around Hemingway, we produced a century's worth of flattened, easy-reading slop, and much knowledge was shared very widely. There was a certain art to the blandness. (One notable master of that art is pg, the creator of this website.)
Then we fed that slop into a giant machine that makes it trivial for anyone and everyone to produce that sort of generic writing. If you want to change minds and differentiate yourself now, you can't just do the old flat style anymore. You have to set yourself apart somehow, and you can start by loving the craft of writing again.
The people who matter will read it and love it. Everybody else can take what you wrote, dump it into the slop machine, and rearrange it into something they find easier to read.
One would hope that you change minds and differentiate yourself through the strength of your argument, rather than the anfractuosity of your prose or a propensity for sesquipedalian verbiage.
Clarity does not equate to genericity. I am regularly struck by clear writing that is both lucid and powerful without resorting to ten-dollar words or tortured syntax.
The fact that AI text is often so easily spotted is a clear sign that so-called 'slop' is not the same as a writing style focused on brevity and understanding over florid meanderings.
I agree that it has been left to the reader to infer, but then again this is not really a how-to guide!
And he gestures at the need for this at least once.
To be able to balance expressiveness and reticence, or to know when to cast that balance away, requires tact and ingenuity and taste on the part of writers
Meta has made some very strange decisions in terms of who it's hired to lead various aspects of AI, including the model-building efforts. Also lots to marvel at re: its ability to coordinate (or not coordinate) various efforts by all these big brains.
Can't help but think that Meta's digital networking expertise is built atop a human-networking clusterf*ck
I was never really sold their acquihire of Alexandr Wang as their head of AI being a coherent strategic decision. I just don’t see how his experience and background actually applies for frontier LLM model building.
I think there would easily be a few other hundred engineers and execs at frontier labs who are more in the loop for cutting edge architecture/secret sauce - with a track record of actually doing it - that could be had for a fraction of the price.
From the outside Meta's attempts to pivot from open source releases to fast follow closed models fell flat when they tried to prematurely monetize it. They could have owned the open weight model world but tried to pivot to closed weight chatbots before an actually viable revenue model appeared.
I've come to believe that Big Tech's fondness for launch-and-kill approaches to new products is closely related to the career incentives for both PMs and finance chiefs. Both of them are acting rationally to advance their careers. In tandem, they create a horrifying cycle of death.
Product managers win their chops by launching something and winning applause for getting fast adoption in the first few months. Once the boss says "Wow," it's on to a bigger new chance. It's habit-forming to outrun your failures in a system where personal incentives reward ephemeral success.
Finance folks win their chops by identifying bits of the company that aren't pulling their (economic) weight. If you haven't delivered $$$ of efficiency savings, why are you even on the payroll? Pulling the plug on small/mid-sized products that have plateaued is the way you get recognition and promotions.
CEOs, of course, could change this. But they're the ultimate plate-spinners in a big company, trying to keep up the appearance that they've got everything in control and making sure that neither shareholders nor employees mutiny. As long as they've got a new sizzle story to sell, no one (except users) is there to grieve about what's dying. And users of a product that's less than 1% of revenue can be safely ignored.
JSTOR does exactly this with scholarly journals, and it works out pretty well. Recent issues are accessible only to paying customers.
Back issues (usually at least a few years old) are available via JSTOR for free in small amounts and through subscriptions for bulk users. I'm sure there's some reason to fight about the details, but from a distance it looks like a pretty good compromise.
The timeline doesn't match up here. We're told that historian Stefan Lorant was doing his research in the 1950s. Then we're told that he checked with Teddy Roosevelt's wife and got her confirmation that one of the children in the window was Teddy Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was married twice, and his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, died in 1884, so it's not her. But his second wife, Edith Carow, died in 1948, at age 87. So unless Lorant interviewed her posthumously, via seance, it can't be her, either.
Our best hope of rescuing this anecdote is to assume that Lorant's research happened earlier (1940s?) while Edith Carow Roosevelt was still alive. But she would have been just three years old at the time of Lincoln's funeral, and while her family and the Roosevelt's family socialized together, even her quoted reminiscence is less than definitive about whether that's actually TR.
Possible? Sure. Probable? Maybe. 100% verified? No way.
From what's presented to us, this sounds like a cool legend
The blog article links Stefan Lorant's own recollection of the event, but the link is broken (fair enough, the blog entry is from 2010). Fortunately though, the link is archived on the Wayback Machine [0], where we can see it is an article from American Heritage, June 1955.
In the linked article Lorent does not specify when exactly he interviewed Edith Carrow Roosevelt, but I think it is fair to assume that the reference to "in the 1950s" is an assumption made by the author of the blog based on when the article was published, and does not cast any doubt on the timeline.
This came up in a Reddit discussion a while back. Snopes has an article about it, in which they quote a source which says that the actual interview happened in 1948.
> But she would have been just three years old at the time of Lincoln's funeral, and while her family and the Roosevelt's family socialized together, even her quoted reminiscence is less than definitive about whether that's actually TR.
While she might not have direct memory of the event, it would not be unheard of for older relatives to explain the picture to her when she was older. Just because she doesn't remember it directly does not automatically make the story of the picture untrue.
So her recollection is that she was in the house to view Lincoln's funeral procession. She didn't, because she was three and got scared, but it was still an event she was a part of.
Even if she didn't remember whether Teddy was standing at that window at that time, she probably knew that she at Teddy and his brother were at the mansion for the event.
So we have the Roosevelt mansion, knowledge that not many boys would have been allowed to be in that window, and confirmation that Teddy Roosevelt was there watching at that time.
> While she might not have direct memory of the event, it would not be unheard of for older relatives to explain the picture to her when she was older. Just because she doesn't remember it directly does not automatically make the story of the picture untrue.
I have a memory of having a tantrum at the Taj Mahal which can't be a real memory because I would have been 3 at the time. But it definitely h appened. It's a reconstructed memory from having seen a photo my dad took from the trip and my dad telling me about it.
Can't be a real memory? That's a bit of a stretch... We do often re-encode our memories: part of us remembers, and part remembers remembering. But certainly when you were 4 you could remember something from when you were 3, and when you are 6 you can probably remember plenty of important things from when you were 4. It's just a question of a particular memory surviving generations of recall, and a question of how each recall helps incrementally re-encode world-truth into our-truth
Possibly, but doesn’t have to be. I grew up in a home that was built as a duplex, one apartment per floor. So the stairs were 17 unpadded wooden steps that were straight down - no landing or turn.
I slipped and fell down them when I was 4. I clearly recall this. But that made me remember that I had done the same thing a year or even two before (which was worse, because at age 4 I was large enough to stop myself before I hit the bottom - not so much at 2-3).
I wouldn’t remember the first incident without the second, but because of it, I do.
Well, at one point I was separated from my mom in downtown London. I wandered aimlessly around until the cops picked me up and took me to the station. They asked me my mom's name - "Mama", and my dad's name "Daddy". Then they asked me where I lived - "in a big house". Eventually my mom showed up at the station and the cops lifted me over the counter back to her.
It was a bit of an adventure for me, but I imagine it was a terrible experience for my mom. I don't recall the interrogation part, but my dad would laugh uproariously when he'd recount how useless the interrogation was.
Scanning this 998-word essay, I'm wondering if OP accepted a dare to write at length about the current state of book reviewing without ever mentioning Goodreads. His essay proves that it can be done, but -- wow! -- what an omission.
Yes, the caliber of reader reviews on Goodreads is all over the map. But it is huge, passionate forum for active readers of all stripes. Spend a little time with lists, filters, reading circles, etc. -- and you can semi-reliably get both reviews and recommendations that are well worth the time invested. Most major publishing houses know this, accept it, and have even come to appreciate it.
As a hardcover author in 2017, I found that my publisher's marketing/publicity team was very comfortable with Goodreads' prominence and felt that its review-by-review quirks balanced out over time in a way that ultimately was quite good for promoting wider readership of interesting books.
It's not obvious from the webpage, but if you are a subscriber or enter your email address you can read the whole essay, which is 4849 words long. And though it does not mention Goodreads explicitly, it does mention "Amazon reviews" as a category (close enough, with Goodreads reviews sometimes? showing up on Amazon) quite a bit at the beginning, for example:
> user reviews exert ever more influence compared to serious criticism […] The rise of Amazon reviews has reinforced a larger pattern of populist impulses challenging older cultural norms. The book clubs and reading circles that do so much to fuel book sales today generally pay little attention to professional critics
Ah, but when you're little, if each misstep annoys a few early users who hit a dead-end with your project, the longer-term reputational damage is trivial. You've still got 99.999% of the TAM (total addressable market) that is ready to be charmed by something new, with no negative vibes in their mind.
As you get bigger, serious numbers of people get annoyed at dealing with a company that keeps inviting us into the Roach Motel of doomed products and features. Big case in point was Google's spree, a few years back, in terms of launching big new services/features that soon afterward got shut down. Great training ground for ambitious PMs; miserable user experience.
Somewhere between the death of Google+ and the demise of Google Hangouts, even folks like me began thinking: Why should I engage with new Google stuff if it's likely to be blown up in a few years, leaving me with buried IP from whatever I tried to do?
Hardcore gamblers' tendency to lash out at athletes, when bets go wrong, can get really scary. This is Point No. 2 in Thompson's analysis -- and it deserves a closer look. From what I've seen, the level of threats, abuse, etc. is just horrifying. The 30x increase in money bet, sadly, seems to be translating into a 30x increase in betters' hostile conduct.
I've seen a huge amount of videos of sports fans having melt downs when their team/player loses, to the point of destroying their own TVs and attacking their guests. I have to believe gambling is a factor in this behavior.
Professional writer here. On our longer work, we go through multiple iterations, with lots of teardowns and recalibrations based on feedback from early, private readers, professional editors, pop culture -- and who knows. You won't find very clear explanations of how this happens, even in writers' attempts to explain their craft. We don't systematize it, and unless we keep detailed in-process logs (doubtful), we can't even reconstruct it.
It's certainly possible to mimic many aspects of a notable writer's published style. ("Bad Hemingway" contests have been a jokey delight for decades.) But on the sliding scale of ingenious-to-obnoxious uses for AI, this Grammarly/Superhuman idea feels uniquely misguided.
OP's critique feels like a celebrity economist's variant of those travel magazine pieces that tell us why Zermatt, Phuket or Nantucket is no longer a "cool" vacation spot. On some sort of momentary buzz meter, sure.
But the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no? Worrying about whether a couple dozen X/Twitter legends are hyping you today feels silly.
Think it's more looking at the trend for Very Serious Political/Economic Commentators to suggest it as a model to emulate in long form articles than the Twitterati, but yeah, it's explicitly asking about opinions rather than whether there's anything about it that's actually broken down. Which is, relatively speaking, a nice place to be as a country.
Cowen is focused mostly on the US commenteriat, but the trend is similar in the UK, where "we should totally be like Singapore" peaked around Brexit, under the delusion idea that all we needed to do to emulated the success of the city state that founded ASEAN two years after declaring independence was leave the EU.
Meanwhile HN generally forms its opinion from a decades-old William Gibson article lamenting that it wasn't cool enough to write cyberpunk about :)
That is what MarginalRevolution is. It's fairly heterodox by most standards, but not in the good way.
> the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no
Nope.
If I can now IPO in China or India with Singapore level valuations and attract Singapore level deal sizes, why would I as a Chinese or Indian want to dedicate significant capital in Singapore beyond what is needed to build an operating shell to interface with western capital markets?
Similarly, if I'm GS, JPMC, Citadel, etc and I'm seeing significant dealflows in China and India, I should concentrate on building an organization within their borders as much as possible - which is what they have been doing since the mid-2010s.
Singapore will remain a major financial hub, but it is losing it's relative advantage to other hubs within Asia.
India and China don't have the low tax stable capitalist system thing that Singapore has. In some ways it's advantage has increased now Hong Kong is part of China.
> low tax stable capitalist system thing that Singapore has
I can say from personal professional experience that historically businesses are domiciled in Singapore primarily for us investors in Western capital markets to enter China, India, and ASEAN.
For capital that is already located in China, India, and parts of ASEAN (primarily Vietnam), that becomes less attractive, especially because China, India, and Vietnam all operate SEZs that have aligned with western corporate law or have BITs signed with major western financial hubs (eg. Pudong SEZ, GIFT City SEZ), so we don't need to route via SG to the same degree we did 20 years ago.
Additionally, if we want to exit our investments in China or India, we have no choice but to list on a Chinese (including Hong Kong) or Indian stock exchange because no other Asian market has comparable trade volume, which makes exits difficult.
Finally, what differentiates Singapore from the Dubai or London? Depending on where you are investing in Asia, you may end up getting much more preferential access from either of those two instead of Singapore.
This is why Singapore has lost it's mojo - it can't differentiate itself as a financial services center and Singapore never really had a strong innovation sector.
If you're writing for yourself (and maybe a very small number of equally erudite readers) cut loose! Embrace "anfractuous density and heedless flamboyance." But if you're trying to change people's minds, or share knowledge widely, everything in this essay is defiantly at odds with what's necessary to get the rest of the world to pay attention.