Why Long Articles Are Dead

I had a website with two long articles on it. Each was thirty-something pages. Each took weeks to write. Each had charts, schematics, footnotes, sections, sub-sections.

Each was read by, generously, almost nobody.

I want to talk about why that happened, what I'm doing instead, and what this whole site is going to look like going forward. Because the failure of the long-form essay isn't a small thing. It's a sign of how reading itself has changed.

When I wrote the long pieces, I thought I was being thorough. I thought I was respecting the reader by laying out every angle of an argument, citing every source, building every figure from scratch. I assumed that if I made the case in enough detail, the case would be undeniable.

This was a misunderstanding of how anyone reads anything in 2026.

Nobody reads thirty pages. Almost nobody reads ten pages. Most people read two screens, decide whether the writer is worth their time, and either move on or skim the rest. The detailed argument I spent weeks building gets evaluated based on the first 400 words.

If the first 400 words didn't grab the reader, the next 14,000 words were irrelevant. The work of the next 14,000 words was wasted, not because the work was bad, but because the format was wrong.

This isn't really about TikTok. It isn't really about social media destroying attention spans. Those are easy explanations and they're mostly excuses.

What changed is that information has become abundant. In 2005, if you wanted to know something serious, you read a long article from a serious source, because that was where the depth lived. In 2026, depth is available everywhere. You can find a 90-minute YouTube video on virtually any topic. You can ask an AI to explain anything at any level. You can find an academic paper, a podcast, a Reddit thread, a Wikipedia article, all on the same topic, in the same minute.

The scarce thing isn't depth. The scarce thing is the reader's time.

When time was abundant and depth was scarce, the long article was the right format. When depth is abundant and time is scarce, the long article is a bad bet. The reader will get the depth somewhere else. What you can offer them is something different: a clear point, made fast, in your voice, with enough specificity to be useful and enough opinion to be memorable.

The thing that actually pushed me to change my mind was reading a piece by Hakan, who is the goat at this. His article was short, sharp, and said in 1,500 words what I had been trying to say in fifteen thousand. I read it twice, agreed with him, and started rewriting everything from scratch.

Here's what I'm doing instead, on every article from now on:

A piece should take five minutes to read at a normal pace. That's roughly 1,200 to 1,500 words of body text. Ten minutes is the hard ceiling. If an article would run longer than that, it's actually two articles, or it needs cutting.

It should have a hook in the first two sentences. Not an introduction. Not background. A specific image, a number, or a moment that pulls the reader into the argument.

It should have a clear thesis stated within the first 200 words. The reader should know what I'm arguing before they decide whether to continue.

It should be in my voice, the way I would actually talk about the topic over a beer with a friend who asked me what I thought. Short sentences. Real opinions. Occasional sharp lines. No hedging. No "to be fair." No "some would argue." If I think something, I say it.

It should have at most three figures, and the figures should hit. Not decorative. Not just for visual variety. Three concrete things that the reader will remember after they close the tab.

It should end on a punch. The closer matters more than the introduction. The last line is what people quote.

And it should be fun to write. Not because writing should always be fun, but because if I'm not enjoying writing it, the reader isn't going to enjoy reading it. There's a tone of obligation in long-form journalism that comes through on the page. I want to write things that feel like I wanted to say them, not like I had to.

I'm aware of what this format sacrifices.

I can't make a fully rigorous case for any complex argument in 1,500 words. The Beer Index piece is a sketch. The Diamonds piece skips most of the supply chain detail. The Flying piece compresses a 200-page cost model into a paragraph. The Consultants piece doesn't enumerate every consulting scandal. Anyone who wants the full depth has to do their own follow-up research.

This bothers me less than it used to. The reader who actually wants the deep version will Google it, ask an AI, or read the appendix. Most readers want to know whether the argument is interesting enough to engage with. That decision happens in five minutes or not at all.

I'm also giving up the ability to defend the argument against every possible objection. The long-form essay can anticipate twelve objections and dismantle them all. The short essay just makes the case and trusts the reader. Some readers will object. Some objections will be valid. That's fine. The article isn't trying to be a court filing. It's trying to be a starting point for thinking.

The big thing is that it actually gets read.

A five-minute piece in clear voice will reach ten times more readers than a thirty-minute essay on the same topic. Maybe a hundred times. The math of distribution massively favors the short, sharp version. Even if the long version is "better" in some abstract sense, the short version reaches more people, gets shared more, and influences more thinking.

The second thing is that it can ship. The thirty-page essays took me weeks each. The five-minute version takes a day. The articles you're reading on this site over the next few months, there are about twenty of them queued up, would never have been written in the long format. The throughput is fundamentally different.

The third thing, and this is the part I didn't expect, is that the short format forces clarity. When you have 1,500 words, you can't hide behind verbosity. Every paragraph has to earn its place. Every sentence has to be doing work. The discipline of the format makes the writing better, not worse.

I should be honest about something. I was writing some of my earlier long articles with AI assistance. Not because I needed help thinking, but because I wanted to expand my ideas into polished long-form. The AI was good at it. The output was professional. It read like serious journalism.

It was also boring.

The earlier articles read like they were written by a McKinsey associate, not by me. The voice was flattened. The personality was sanded off. The specific moments that make me me, the trip to Vietnam where I figured out the beer index, the diamond company I almost bought, the parking garage with the broken cameras, got buried under generic prose.

The new format flips this. I write the raw take, in my voice, the way I'd say it out loud. I let AI help with research, fact-checking, and polish, but the voice stays mine. The result is articles that sound like a specific human had a specific opinion, instead of articles that sound like the consensus position of every smart person in a particular field.

This matters. The internet doesn't need more consensus. It has enough consensus. What it needs more of is people willing to say a thing they actually believe, in their actual voice, knowing that some readers will disagree.

If you've been reading this site, what you're getting from now on is the short version. Five minutes. Three figures. A clear point. My voice.

If you want the deep version, the data is in the footnotes, or you can ask. The math under the flying article is a 200-page bottom-up cost model. The diamond article rests on six months of due diligence on a French diamond company. The consultants piece is built on real DOJ settlements and McKinsey's own published research. None of that's gone. It's just not in the article.

The article is the doorway. What's behind the door is up to you to chase.

The age of the thirty-page essay is over. Not because depth is dead, but because depth lives elsewhere now. What I can offer that nobody else can is a specific opinion in a specific voice on a specific topic, fast.

That's what this site is going to be. Five minutes at a time. As long as it takes.