
A 1982 double murder and two men accused, convicted, and exonerated of the crime - benbreen
https://read.atavist.com/whatsoever-things-are-true
======
DanielBMarkham
Holy moley, what a long article.

I slogged through it. I enjoy long format pieces when the author has some sort
of clear narrative. In this case, however, I feel a bit more outlining
wouldn't have hurt things. Several times I felt as if both the author and I
were bumping into things without knowing why they were there in the text --
and we interpreted those things differently. Editorializing is fine, just cop
to it in the first few graphs.

Structurally, it was a worthy effort. Thematically, it should have collapsed
into a semi-long format opinion piece. I grow a bit tired of the New Yorker
format of showing me an explosion, then cutting to a small bug crawling up a
blade of grass. I know I'm in for an hour of reading before I get back to the
explosion. Meanwhile the author is trying to make a point, but is too coy to
just come out and say it.

For those of you without the time, here's my tl;dr

1) Chicago is a deeply corrupt city. Everything is politics.

2) Lots of convictions have happened on less than solid grounds. Over the last
20 years or so, folks have starting making names for themselves by getting
innocent men freed.

3) The problem here, as we've learned over and over again with the criminal
justice system, is that if you poke at a case long enough, it starts to look
shaky and broken. Even if it wasn't.

4) This entire "was he guilty or not" game has become both a political
football and the means by which people get rich, famous, and admired by
others. That means it has little to do with what it's supposed to be about:
whether the person was guilty or not.

5) There's a ton of background he-said, she-said detail on how one particular
case came down. At the end the reader doesn't know any more about who killed a
couple of people in 1982 than they did at the beginning. The author realizes
it was never about that in the first place, which is how the article should
have started.

~~~
at-fates-hands
>> At the end the reader doesn't know any more about who killed a couple of
people in 1982 than they did at the beginning.

This is probably the one thing that infuriates me about long form articles. At
the end of reading a 15-20 minute article there's absolutely no pay-off, no
conclusion and nothing worthwhile to take away from it.

------
EC1
I can't wait until we go back to plaintext articles with a few styles instead
of these stupid edgy designs. Unbearable.

~~~
kyberias
Seriously, was there some AB-testing in progress. My page was just fine.
Single clean column of text with no particular effects.

~~~
EC1
It's needlessly hectic. It's not a movie, it's TEXT. It starts off with some
silly animation. Then another entirely pointless page with features that could
easily be triggered by some sort of side menu or icon row in the top right of
the screen. Now I've scrolled through two pages of crap.

Then there's a paragraph taking up another page. And NOW is the article, which
fits into a fixed 800px wide container.

The "A" in the top right is an edgy animated menu instead of being A+ / A- to
resize text which is what I thought it was.

\- Make it fluid

\- Cut any and all fluff

If I have to spend even the slightest effort to get to understand your layout
or feel comfortable with the site, I just close it. I don't have that sort of
time.

I hate all these new style article sites that are made just to justify the
developers salary.

------
ledude
ignoring the content for a moment..

the layout and color choices of this page make reading this unbearable..
they're distracting, annoying, and infuriating at the same time. please... for
readers' sake.. stop designing pages like this.

~~~
kyberias
I'm sorry, would you care to elaborate? It's black text on white background.
Very good contrast. Pretty big font. What was wrong exactly? Did we read the
same page?

~~~
ledude
look at it on a high resolution screen (eg 1440p).. \- 2/3+ of the screen is
wasted.. why am i penalized for having a solid resolution? \- unnecessary
javascript text animations.. this is a story about injustice.. not a trailer
for star wars \- dropcaps the that literally take up 1/2 the width of the text
container.. \- enough scrolling to properly piss you off.. and no, this isn't
because of the content.. its because of shit design

this is a heavy article to begin with. i got frustrated with the horrid design
before i got half way through and copied it into text editor without any
styles

