Honest question: Do many people read these entire New Yorker articles? This is what happens to me as I'm looking at HN:<p>From the main page, I open a bunch of tabs that look interesting. On some types of issues, I also open a tab on the HN discussion.<p>From there, I just wander through the tabs, reading stories and mostly just glancing at some of the top comments. My goal when I browse is to learn something new, and I try to remember that as I'm reading.<p>When I hit a New Yorker article's tab, I've often half-forgotten the subject line from HN... maybe it matches the article's title, but I just start reading regardless. Four or five paragraphs in, I start to think, "What the hell does all this setup have to do with the article title I clicked on?" Sure, on some level I know that it probably has something esoteric to do with the main article. These people must be paid by the word.<p>A couple paragraphs further and I start turning the mouse wheel to skim ahead. "Where do they start actually talking about the topic that looked interesting?" At that point, the New Yorker column has maybe mentioned the topic in an ancillary way, but oftentimes it's just warming up by bringing in some personality that they're going to focus on later in relation to the topic.<p>I get impatient.<p>I start scrolling faster, looking for some actual text to sink my mind into. At this point, I'm very conscious that I have a bunch of other potentially interesting tabs open in my browser and I've only allocated fifteen minutes or so before I need to get back to work. I scroll way down, hoping that I'll hit a paragraph that looks like it's full of information. Maybe I'll find one that looks interesting, but at that point I also don't have a whole lot of context to go on. It's like that endlessly long joke that you zone out on and then when they get to the punchline, maybe it sounds kind of funny, but you weren't paying attention to all the setup.<p>I close the tab and wonder how anyone has the time and patience to read these things. Maybe I'm just a slow reader.