Don’t read this, read these
by Steve
Rather than reading my floundering attempts at bloggery, you should really check out The Electric Typewriter‘s newly collated list of 111 Essential Articles and Essays. They seem to have covered a lot of the better-known essays that are free to access on the world-wide, but there are plenty I haven’t read yet.
While it probably isn’t a sustainable business model, I think the whole ‘Longreads” phenomenon is perhaps the best counter to the arguments around the dumbing down of the web/general dumbing down of popular cultural consumption by the web. Beyond that, it is just great to be able to read a whole lot of wonderful writing that previously you’d only be able to see if you had an exhaustive archive of magazines or if the article/essay got anthologised somewhere.
Anyway, take a break from my ramblings and see how it should be done. And if you feel so inclined do comment on what articles/essays on the list you’ve read and would recommend. Happy Friday everyone.
Image from the US National Archives, via Flickr
Thanks for the list. You’ve given me several months’ worth of downtime reading.
I agree with you re: Longreads. I’d prefer spend an afternoon reading some of these higher-quality long form essays over some of the quickie posts at, say, Gawker. But this hints at the problem (or might be the central problem, really) that content producers on the Internet are going to face. It looks like most of the essays in the Electric Typewriter post are from professional authors who’ve already been published; the essays have all appeared in paper form elsewhere. It’s nice to have these essays online, and free at that, but until there’s a consistent source web-exclusive quality writing, I suspect the Internet will continue to suffer its dumbed-down reputation.
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[…] a follow-up to my Longreads love. After mulling over how publishing long essays/articles online could possibly be a sustainable […]
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