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

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.

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".

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...