And difficult newspapers! And difficult news!
Our journalist class has somehow got into this ELI5 routine, where they feel obligated to turn every complex subject into something a fifth grader can debate about.
I kind of miss the articles that span 10 pages and really dive into a subject matter. Modern long form articles seem unnecessarily padded with personal stories to me. The actual information content is not that much in the end.
Re:Why We Need Difficult Books
by probably_wrong on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @06:06AM
(#18449023)
For a good example of long form journalism done right, I heartily recommend The Guardian's article about what will happen when the Queen of England dies [1]. I never thought there would be that much protocol to it, but clearly I was wrong.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens...
You can probably blame readability tests, SEO and other related stuff for that. There's a lot of advice online saying that simply written, clearly broken up articles divided into small sections/lists and aimed at a fifth grader's reading level are the way to attract more traffic/readers.
Well maybe that and lowest common denominator marketing. Or the need to pander to social media users, most of whom have at best about five minutes to read an article and not much knowledge of its background.
I would've thought they request they're not older than a year; libraries and secondhand book shops / charities often have a shelf of e.g. Office 2003 for dummies lying around still.
Some books are timeless though; Tanenbaum, Knuth, etc.
Re:Why We Need Difficult Books
by LarryMade2 on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @11:08AM
(#18450901)
Yeah not older than a year was another part of that - which also takes off a lot of great books. I have some references from 1990s and early 2000s that are way more thorough than the later stuff produced.
Part of the reason I patronize my library is because to me it is like a mental gymnasium, where all this great equipment there to test my intellectual flexibility and endurance, too tough? I go for easier, but I appreciate the hard stuff because at some point, I, or someone else will find them useful.
Yes, we all NEED access to difficult books (and old books before they refined the such subjects and made them so difficult), don't make our libraries and book shops into mere mental playgrounds.