Against the Tyranny of the Take

The take is the dominant literary form of our era and it is a genuinely impressive one: three hundred words, delivered inside ninety minutes, confident, quotable, wrong at a rate nobody bothers to measure.

I have written them. They are enjoyable to write, which is part of the problem — the pleasure arrives at the moment of assertion rather than the moment of understanding, and those two moments used to be much further apart.

What we lose is not accuracy exactly. It is revision. Thinking is mostly the act of changing your mind in private before anybody sees you do it, and the economics of publishing now reward doing it in public, at speed, where the reputational cost of the change is high enough that most people simply decline to change.

The remedy is unglamorous: write slower, publish less, keep the piece in a drawer for four days. Almost every essay I am not ashamed of spent time in that drawer. Almost every one I regret went out the same afternoon.