On: Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (1982)

[chris_mahan]

Is it me or is the article way too long?

[tptacek → chris_mahan]

It is just you. That article is a classic in long-form investigative journalism.

[jcastro → tptacek]

That's how I started figuring out it wasn't a recent article. I ran into this link from the G+ HN circle and didn't see a mention of the date.

Then about 1/3 of the way through I started thinking "what the hell, no article can be this long", then I looked at the date.

A great read though, it does a lot to remind us how articles used to be back in the day before our current attention spans.

[sp332 → jcastro]

Atlantic articles that get upvoted on hn are generally pretty long.

[mng2 → jcastro]

It's more a function of the magazine the article runs in. Mags like the Atlantic and the New Yorker still run plenty of long-form journalism.

[yeoldestuff → tptacek]

God how I miss that.

Where can I find 100's more like this, _on the web_?

[tptacek → yeoldestuff]

Easy: Longform.org.

Slate aggregates and curates some of these:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/longform.html

[yeoldestuff → tptacek]

Sweet. Thanks.

[zalew → yeoldestuff]

http://longreads.com

http://longform.org

[henrikschroder → zalew]

Sweet! Found an old longform article I had lost the link to and couldn't google back either. Thanks!

[vidarh → yeoldestuff]

Entirely off topic to this post, but given the HN audience, this is one of my all time favorite long form articles:

"Mother Earth Mother Board" by Neal Stephenson. Wired. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

It's about FLAG - Fibre Optic Link Around the Globe. 40k+ words.