The Age of the Essay

bluFox writes "Paul Graham, has just published a new article on the English literature and role of Essays. It is not connected to lisp or languages or hackers for a change, but still feels like a continuation of his earlier articles."

Comments

Re:Why is this on Slashdot?

[bugbear]

There is a big connection to the Internet, if not to hackers per se. Roughly that blogs will lead to a renaissance in the essay.

I went back and forth about mentioning blogs by name, because not everything people publish on their own site is really "blogging" in the strict sense. "Blog" implies "log", which implies a time quantum of less than a day. Whereas it takes me weeks to write an essay.

Here's a footnote I commented out that made the connection to the Web more explicit:

When I first heard about blogs, I imagined they would be a complete waste of time. Blogging sounded like a long-play version of netnews. But I was mistaken; people care more about something that stays on their site, and the Web supplies a filter that's missing in newsgroups. The best writing online is not only better than netnews, but better than most print media.