There is a version of this essay that is a complaint about attention spans, and it is boring, and it is also wrong. People read enormously. They read more words in a day than any previous generation of readers. What has changed is not capacity. It is the cost of starting.
A long piece asks for a commitment before it has earned one. The reader has to decide, on the basis of a headline and a first line, to give up twenty minutes. That is a real ask, and the honest response is not to lecture the reader about it. It is to make the first three paragraphs do more work.
So we set rules for ourselves. The first paragraph has to contain something that could only be in this piece — a fact, a scene, a number, a voice. The second has to tell the reader what they are in for. The third has to give them a reason to keep going that is not simply momentum. If a piece cannot clear those three, it is not ready, however good paragraph nine is.
We also stopped pretending that length is the same as depth. A [word count]-word piece that circles one idea is less deep than a [word count]-word piece that lands it. Cutting is not a compromise; it is the work. The pieces we are proudest of are usually the ones that lost the most in editing.
The other half of the problem is structural. A reader who arrives from a search result has no relationship with us. A reader who arrives from the newsletter does. That is why the newsletter exists, and why it is short, and why it goes out on a schedule we can actually keep. Depth is not only a property of the writing. It is a property of the relationship.
We are not going to win a race for the fastest take. We are going to be the place where the considered version lives, and we are going to make it easy enough to start that people actually get to the end.