The essential must-read guide on how to read all those must-reads
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Version 0 of 1. I note, with a mixture of excitement and foreboding, that Byliner's Conor Friedersdorf has published his annual list of the best nonfiction writing available online: 102 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories From 2012. Excitement, obviously, because it's a list of 102 spectacular nonfiction stories, the majority of which I haven't yet read, and I'm a voracious consumer of good narrative nonfiction. And foreboding because – well, for the same reason. It's a list of 102 spectacular nonfiction stories. How on earth am I supposed to find time to read them? This feeling is growing familiar. Despite the predictions from certain new media gurus about "the end of the article as the atomic unit of news", we seem, by contrast, to be entering a golden age of the article – including, most thrillingly of all, the deeply researched longform article. It's not clear how sustainable this is, given the precipitous state of media business models. But in the meantime, this excellent development has the stress-inducing flipside – for me, anyway – of figuring out which ones to read, and when. Welcome – although, to his credit, Friedersdorf doesn't use the term – to the era of "the must-read". Let's not dwell here on the linguistic horror of that word. The real problem with must-reads is that they're everywhere: in my Twitter feed, I'm sure I encounter a minimum of a dozen articles, daily, described that way. Most aren't must-reads, of course, which is a big part of the problem; news organisations have a short-term incentive to describe everything that way. They're hoping to activate your Fear of Missing Out, and the main thing is just to get you to click. But the deeper explanation is what Nicholas Carr has called ambient overload (and which I've written about previously). Until recently, it was common to encounter the argument that the web ought to <em>reduce</em> overload, because it lets us customise what we receive, filtering out the irrelevant. Social media was supposed to make this better still: by relying on my networks of Twitter and Facebook contacts, I'd naturally come to focus on stuff recommended by people whose tastes I trust. The result might be an echo chamber – but at least I'd no longer be drowning. Yet, as Carr points out, the reverse has occurred. Thanks to the vast quantities of information available online, good filters just mean an unending supply of purified interestingness, connecting me to articles of which, in earlier times, I'd have been happily unaware. A print newspaper, because it has to appeal to a broad range of readers, will inevitably strike any given reader as a manageable patchwork of very interesting, slightly interesting, and really dull stories. By contrast, Twitter is a firehose of links to compelling reads. Likewise The Browser. Likewise Stellar. Likewise, Dave Pell's NextDraft newsletter, to which you really should subscribe, except that it'll just mean even more great articles deserving of your time. My solution to this, so far, is a technical and utterly imperfect one, but it helps a bit. With Evernote installed on my computer, iPad and phone, I can file away an interesting webpage with a single click; it's then automatically synched to the other two devices. Then, in bored moments when I'd otherwise reach for any reading material in sight – riding public transport, waiting for a friend – I have access to things I genuinely want to read instead. Still far too many of them, of course. But it's a start. |