I tend to love articles that tease a bit before revealing what they're about, but I found this one a bit overwrought.
tl;dr: it's about Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference).
This article, at its clearest, says:
> Certainly it’s wrong to say that “The Road Not Taken” is a straightforward and sentimental celebration of individualism: This interpretation is contradicted by the poem’s own lines.
However, the thrust of the whole article is better captured by its soggy, everybody-wins non-conclusion:
> The poem both is and isn’t about individualism, and it both is and isn’t about rationalization. It isn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf
> I tend to love articles that tease a bit before revealing what they're about
Could you give me some insight about why you like this? It's one of my least favorite aspects of journalism. Most articles are bad, so don't you find that you waste more time sorting through chaff?
Sometimes a bunch of drifting around, talking at length in detail about seemingly unrelated minutiae, and blatantly teasing the reader along can set a mood or an atmosphere. If it is done properly, it can convey more than what the words on the paper are explicitly saying, it just makes an impression.
An example that would maybe work for the HN crowd is this old essay about Earthbound [0], where the writer (Tim Rogers, translator) "reviews" the game by just going on long detours about fishing, being sick in bed, things that happen in other games, etc. As a huge fan of Earthbound, it just captures a lot of it for me.
An absolute master of this kinda thing was the well-known rock record critic Lester Bangs (who, again, may be vaguely known to some; Philip S. Hoffman played him in "Almost Famous"). His rock album reviews are barely recognizable as such by the "8/10 graphics, 6/10 sound" crowd. He just goes on and on about completely esoteric topics, from politics and his life philosophy and little vignettes about his personal life, and occasionally relates it back to the record. I don't know why, but I dig it. I've read "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung", an essay compendium, a couple of times.
I don't know if I'd want something like that if I was writing an essay for university, or trying to decide which laptop to buy, but it can occasionally be a very nice piece of journalism.
Thanks for that description, it helps me appreciate the practice more. The success of that technique entirely depends on the talent of the writer, apparently, because I've come across a few too many "long form" articles after "longform" became an internet buzzword, and where the writing just seems to alternate between the topic and an unrelated topic in almost an algorithmic fashion, before they are weakly tied together.
I have two related points of reference. The first is a chess game, the shifting long-term tensions of which become more perceptible and enjoyable in the opening phase as one increases in skill; and the second is another article posted not so long ago on HN about linguistic studies measuring the distance in sentences between the main subject data and the main predicate data (or similar, I may be abridging it). At the time the focus was on how much more comprehensible sentences are when that distance is short, but I kept thinking about how many of our celebrated authors and poets display virtuosity by extending that distance from time to time, building and exercising suspense.
I also like it, when it's well done, but it's very difficult to pull off. I think most instances are just poor decisions by the author that they're going to do just that, and they don't quite pull it off.
I see it well done in The New Yorker quite often, and sometimes the NYT.
tl;dr: it's about Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference).
This article, at its clearest, says:
> Certainly it’s wrong to say that “The Road Not Taken” is a straightforward and sentimental celebration of individualism: This interpretation is contradicted by the poem’s own lines.
However, the thrust of the whole article is better captured by its soggy, everybody-wins non-conclusion:
> The poem both is and isn’t about individualism, and it both is and isn’t about rationalization. It isn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf