Oliver Sacks Put Himself into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?

I agree that its a hard read, and seemingly never got to the point of the title of the article. I started reading it and by about the eighth or nineth paragraph the article was still ruminating on his gay love affair so I just skimmed the rest and I couldn't make heads or tails of the rest of it either.

Its shocking how bad some writers are these days.

The New Yorker's primary editorial thrust has always been that the author is more important than the subject, and the journey is more important than having a thesis at all.

If you go further, the whole thing wraps around. His suppression of his own sexuality, led him to embellish, to write out his own internal dialogue into the "nonfiction" books he wrote. So it all eventually comes back to the thesis, but yes, it's a huge drag to read through, but then Sacks' own writing is so turgid and overly dramatic, like he was writing for an audience.

The first sentence too is apt, "butter colored suit that reminded him of the sun" is a great example of Sacks' writing style.

Respectfully, I'm not sure you can draw meaningful conclusions about a 100+ paragraph deep-dive article after reading the first eight or nine. The biography stuff is definitely relevant to the takeaways about Sacks' methodology and style:

> Other doctors had dismissed these patients as hopeless, but Sacks had sensed that they still had life in them—a recognition that he understood was possible because he, too, felt as if he were “buried alive.”

[...]

> Another patient is so aroused and euphoric that she tells Sacks [according to his telling in Awakenings], “My blood is champagne”—the phrase Sacks used to describe himself when he was in love with Vincze.

[...]

> “I know, in a way, you don’t feel like living,” Sacks tells her, in another recorded session. “Part of one feels dead inside, I know, I know that. . . . One feels that one wants to die, one wants to end it, and what’s the use of going on?”

> “I don’t mean it in that way,” she responds.

> “I know, but you do, partly,” Sacks tells her. “I know you have been lonely all your life.”

Speaking of suboptimal writing, why call it a 'gay' love affair, when he was openly gay?

I love when the new yorker gets posted to HN because of how many people will proudly announce themselves not equal to the challenge of a mainstream middlebrow magazine article.

Exactly.

It's the equivalent of those people on Reddit or social media in general who make fun of three-star Michelin restaurants.

I get that sometimes you just want McDonald's, and I don't think there is a definition of better and worse in either of these contexts that doesn't require injecting some kind of taste. But nonetheless.

That description (mainstream middlebrow) would have been accurate in 1980. I don't think it is anymore.

Long form journalism is not a common thing anymore, men (who dominate HN) are not enthusiastic readers anymore, and the cultural conversation that a dead-tree magazine represents is no longer amplified in mass media (as opposed to an era when David Frost and Dick Cavett had primetime shows on TV).

I don't disagree about the reverse snobbery, but IMO people being "not equal to the challenge" isn't the actual problem.

If anything is shocking it is how modern readers have to be spoon fed bullet points and can't handle the slightest complexity of composition.

I love most of their stuff and the writing is pretty eloquent as it takes you on a journey that's easy to follow and flows easily from one paragraph to another.

This was just a slog that I felt went nowhere and the points were buried in between rambling information about Sacks and his gay lifestyle, lovers and living in NYC and the gay lifestyle there at the time.

Not only was it not interesting, it was poorly written and hard to read. Sometimes writers just need to stick to the facts instead of trying to write another "The Phenomenology of Spirit" for a "middlebrow magazine".

One of the most important details of Sacks's life which dogged him nearly to the end (and which is important to this NY piece), was a minimization by Sacks of his own sexuality. He was not "openly gay" at all.

I read four other articles in this week's New Yorker by the time I got to this one and the problem it has is we are probably at this point all familiar with the story of a gay person coming to accept themselves and there was nothing new in this version for a very long time so when it belabors the point there is a real danger to losing the audience, I read the magazine just prior to bed and gave up on this one after first attempt, enjoyed the rest of the magazine (even some of the culture articles about New York residents) and came back to this article and fell asleep.

In a few decades reading will be a lost art. Yes the stats are really that worrying.

I don't think it's as revealing as you suggest.

Writers write, and editors edit, for an audience. HN is definitely not a perfect match for the New Yorker's intended audience.

But most readers of the New Yorker would choke on the kind of stuff that is perfectly aligned with HN's readership, so...

It might be that modern readers have other things they can read/do with their time. In pre internet times it wasn't so much the case - you'd buy a mag or book and then read it but now there are many alternatives a click away.

Pros and cons but often in the old days it was spun out to fill some volume the the printing press was set for like 400 pages in a book. I did Great Expectations at school which had about ten chapters with the main story and then about 60 chapters of irrelevant stuff because Dickens was paid weekly by the chapter.