If you hate the format of these kinds of article let me summarize:
Guy builds an experiment, flies it, it doesn't work, requests more time to get it working, is denied, threatens 'not to come back', goes into a depression, worries crew that he'll open the door to space, eventually granted more time to work on the experiment, gets it working.
There are consequences for letting this kind of person fly and dealing with mental health while on a mission, but that's the basic plot.
I don't think the problem is with the format, but with your expectations. Somehow you were expecting a straight answer to the question in the title; instead, it's a detailed look into the incident and the context around it.
No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res" where the story starts at a heightened moment of tension, then abruptly stops and rewinds to go back to fill in details of how they got to this exciting moment.
Sometimes it's done to great effect, like in Fight Club (film starts with him at the climax with a gun in his mouth, then rewinds and tells the story).
However, it is often used as a clumsy device by novice writers. They use it to get the audience to stick around for their mostly boring story.
I see this a lot on Youtube. The Youtuber will start with a compelling question and story, like "There he was... tied to the wall as he watched the firing squad load their weapons with gun powder.... But before we continue our story, what is gun powder? Well, it's composed of potassium nitrate, blah, blah, blah...."
You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited for the detour, then it's done well. If instead it feels like a long annoying interruption you want to skip, then it's done poorly.
For me, it's done poorly in this article. I read the first compelling section, then the writer slows everything down to a snail's pace to go into some very dry history of NASA without ever really giving a good payoff to the story he opened with.
"In medias res" vs "longform" is an important distinction, as you've highlighted. As the parent commented, a lot of this has to do with how we frame the article via the title. The title sets the expectation for the article. In this case, it provides a misleading ethos for discerning audiences.
But the title was not "This is what happened to Taylor Wang". It's about a general question. His particular case was just the opener. The rest of the article tells what's promised in the title, not what you maybe expected when hoping to read about the story of a single person.
I watched Dumb Money (2023) last night and it starts this same way. It was completely unnecessary, was done in a confusing way, and this plot device didn't add anything to enhance the excitement of the story. A completely linear plot would have been just fine, especially since everyone knows the story gets more interesting (even from the trailer alone). In fact, the interesting part of the story that most people don't know is the beginning... how it all started before it was exciting.
It was still an entertaining movie, so I wouldn't let this one poor choice deter anyone.
Purely subjectively, I find it way more egregious and annoying on Youtube (because YT won't monetize shorter articles) and less convenient to skim past if you don't like the structure of the video.
You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or
poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited
for the detour, then it's done well
I was a maybe little frustrated here, but we already know the ending of the story, right? The guy did return from space. The guy did not open the hatch and kill the crew. Pretty sure we'd all remember that.
So with that in mind I thought the detour into "what brought this dude to the point where he was refusing commands from Mission Control" was quite welcome.
>"I see this a lot on Youtube. The Youtuber will start with a compelling question and story, like "There he was... tied to the wall as he watched the firing squad load their weapons with gun powder.... But before we continue our story, what is gun powder? Well, it's composed of potassium nitrate, blah, blah, blah...."
It gets even worse. Looking for answer to particular question and hits the video that claims to have it. Let's say concise answer is 5 words. The video is 30 minutes long with those 5 words spaced evenly throughout.
History and flashback are not equivalent terms. Most history books do not open with a dramatic moment at a critical juncture of [historical event] and then flip back and forth between the lead-up and the dramatic moment to maintain narrative tension. This is sensationalism; it's literally designed to keep you on the edge of your seat.
And no, Homer does not use this technique in the Iliad, other than brief verbal allusions back to the original cause of the Trojan war. The Iliad starts in the middle of the conflict, but doesn't repeatedly skip the narrative backward in time; the plot is linear and the the dramatic tension comes from wondering if/when the champion warrior Achilles is going to stop sulking over a perceived insult and rejoin his army to fend off the Trojans.
> No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res"
This is like saying: This is not simply a mug, this is porcelain. Narrative and narrative technique are two different things, just like the function of an object is different thing than the material of the object.
It's also probably just a hook, not a full "in media res".
I think this article is actually a pretty good example of long-form journalism; the jump it makes to reveal the context is fairly small, and relevant from the first few words.
In many other articles, however, the context switch is almost nonsensical, making the reader wonder if the writer will ever actually get to the point.
While I agree that in the past few decades our attention spans have gotten very short, I also think there's a slight disconnect between the clickbaity titles and many articles. For that matter, this happens with videos as well; things that can be answered in 2-3 minutes get turned into a 10 minute video with a large amount of fluff.
Nowadays there is so much fluff added (as an "SEO hack" to increase reading time) to what could be otherwise short posts, that long-form was bound to suffer by association. Of course, some never liked long form. I prefer it, but not it's SEO'd brethren
The whole point of the inverted pyramid was that editors/layout people could chop off the article at any point to fit the space available and have it still make sense, back when newspapers were laid out in columns and on physical pages. It's not an idealized platonic form information transfer.
"Studies of 19th-century news stories in American newspapers, however, suggest that the form spread several decades later than the telegraph, possibly because the reform era's social and educational forces encouraged factual reporting rather than more interpretive narrative styles.[2]"
Nothing in this thread requires "narratives being conveyed in only a couple bullet points" and that also isn't what the inverse pyramid is about. The inverse pyramid is about the ordering of information, not the level of detail or quantity.
Do you think important information was withhold here? Which information was not important?
It was a investigative article, about an incident that happened long ago, with most participants already dead by today. If something is worth a long article - then this is.
The personal biography of Wang, for starters. I do not give a shit when he was born or where he went to school. I'm only mildly interested in what he worked on.
The issue is the headline. It posits a question, then jerks you around until you've spent long enough on the page to satisfy some engagement metric.
It's writing for television, where any yes/no question always happens to take exactly 30 minutes (and multiple commercial breaks) to answer, starting with the history of philosophy and reason itself.
It's scummy behavior, like timeshare sales or giving people free samples of spicy beef jerky and making them wait in line for water.
The title "The First Man to Refuse to Return from Space" would be more appropriate for an investigative article. Then you'd know what to expect. But they went the clickbait route, hence the irritation.
> The personal biography of Wang, for starters. I do not give a shit when he was born or where he went to school. I'm only mildly interested in what he worked on.
It is highly relevant to the story. I was asking myself "So why was he even on this space mission?" You may not have had this question, but the main reason Wang gives for his state of mind around the incident is directly linked to his biography. He immigrated from China to the US at age 22, went into US academic science, and became a US citizen.
So he was in a position to be the first Chinese person in space, and he feels like a representative of all Chinese people. I see a lot of my father in him, who immigrated to the US around the same time and holds a lot of those conflicted feelings. The reason he threatened to not come back, in his own words, was not because he really cared about doing the science or because the result was really important even to him personally. It was because he would be failing in the eyes of the world. The words of his father (speaking in his head) to not bring shame to his family were more influential than the words of NASA mission command telling him to follow orders (speaking in his ear).
If you don't think where someone was born (China) and then went to school (USA) matters given this, then you have missed a big point of this article because you tried to speedrun long-form journalism.
None of that is relevant to what I want to get out of an article titled "What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?" If I wanted a bunch of random facts or life stories I'd use the random option on Wikipedia.
Random people are not flying with the Space Shuttle. And when people who do fly go nuts - then everything about this person is helpful to understand the "why" and how to prevent such a situation in the future. Of course NASA did that professionally already long ago - but now it is debated in the open. So some people deeply interested with the field, will want to play hobby psychoanalyst with the given facts. The more the better. You clearly don't want to and that is also OK, but maybe accept that some people like it like this. And just as a suggestion, you can nowdays get a AI to give you a short summary ...
"The issue is the headline. It posits a question, then jerks you around until you've spent long enough on the page to satisfy some engagement metric."
But there was and is just no definite answer, except for drama. I found every bit interesting and relevant to be able to picture the situation.
"The title "The First Man to Refuse to Return from Space" would be more appropriate for an investigative article. "
And no, because it was way more severe than this: he said he won't come home and he said figurativly "oh, I can just open this airlock and then we all would die?" (where "unless you give in to my demands" was maybe intentionally implied - maybe not, he was not mentally stable)
So an actual clickbaity sounding headline, that would have actually be quite close to the truth, would be:
"First man in space, who threatened to kill everyone on board"
But Ars did not do this. Partly because they are not (so much) into the clickbait game, but partly because the facts are (intentionally by NASA) not that clear here. And the Author tried to gather as much facts as he could. So giving us, where he was born and went to school was no real answer to the title question - but it helped me getting a picture of the person in question, which is still alive, but who refused to comment. Because people have reasons for why they act like they do:
"When I turned on my own instrument, it didn't work," Wang said. "You can imagine my panic. I had spent five years preparing for this one experiment. Not only that, I was the first person of Chinese descent to fly on the Shuttle, and the Chinese community had taken a great deal of interest. You have to understand the Asian culture. You don't just represent yourself; you represent your family. The first thing you learn as a kid is to bring no shame to the family. So when I realized that my experiment had failed, I could imagine my father telling me, 'What's the matter with you? Can't you even do an experiment right?' I was really in a very desperate situation"
I don't think this article is guilty of that. Maybe OP thought this was one of those "<Interesting intro with a simple quickly answerable question> ... Dave lives in a small house nestled into the hills of rural Wales. He has long flowing hair and a slight stutter. His three children - Mary, Anna-belle and Calista - have long sense left home and he spends most of his time blah blah blah blah I don't care."
I think hating something is kind of personal matter.
But very often these "long-form" articles can be tiring. They just circle around something, never getting to the point, adding just unimportant details that should create some form of "connection".
It very often feels that it is not long because the author has something to say but it is long because it is meant to appear that "long-form" article.
It's like reading novels from Victor Hugo, where he takes good part of the volume to describe rooms in detail. Now it is certainly interesting for a movie director who would like to build an authentic interior but the fact is that he just got paid by the length, so this was his tool go accomplish his goal - getting paid more.
Just saying something is "long form" because you counted the words is silly. This is Ars Technica. They aren't long because some fifth grade teacher gave them a minimum amount of pages. If the article has some length, it's because it takes the subject seriously and doesn't compromise on nuance and context just for clicks.
> If the article has some length, it's because it takes the subject seriously and doesn't compromise on nuance and context just for clicks.
And yet it feels fluffy. The incident could be described in a single paragraph. The response could be an other. The organisation of the crew training and how it effected the incident could be third, while future instances when the lock was used could be a fourth. So about 800 words, compared to the 3000 words it is.
Multiple of us on this comment thread feels it is fluffy, you are asserting it is not. But you are not providing any reason other than that the author is a professional and we should trust them? That is not quite convincing when at the same time I am reading their fluffy article.
Why do i feel it is fluf? Because the article is going on and on while not answering any of the basic questions I have: what did factually happen in the cabin? Did he just say what he said and then went sulking? Did he move closer to the hatch? Was he trained on how to operate the hatch? How long did the fix take? What were the consequences on the schedule? What were the consequences on the experiment itself? (Did it perform as intended after the fix or did it only hobble?) Why did they had highly trained payload specialist if they were not given latitude to perform fixes? You don’t need a physicist to push buttons on a schedule. Did NASA let any further payload specialist who had this deep connection with one of the experiments on? Were fixes performed by the payload specialist a normal thing ever?
Did anyone from Nasa follow up with him? Was this a misunderstanding? Are we sure he didn’t just say he is not going to return to space one more time just to try his experiment again?
Where the expectations about the experiment shared between the experimenter and mission control? Have they discussed contingencies in the planning steps? Did they in future spaceflights?
But they could say: “oh, the actual incident is just a jumping off point, the article is about the human factors and how we should design machinery to account for (and prevent) emotionally disturbed people harming themselves and others with them” in which case I have an other set of questions: space is not unique in the sense that people have access to simple means to end themselves. People who drive are often a simple twitch away from dying as surely as you do if you open a hatch in space. What are the statistics about that? Same about airplane piloting, same about weapons. In which ways is space different from the above, and in which ways is it the same? Are there other things to worry about, or is it only the hatch? Did anything similar ever happen on a submarine, or an artic station?
And instead of answering any of these important and interesting questions the author is going on in length what feels like the same 2 and half facts again and again.
Because the article is going on and on while not answering
any of the basic questions I have: what did factually happen
in the cabin? Did he just say what he said and then went
sulking? Did he move closer to the hatch? Was he trained on
how to operate the hatch? How long did the fix take? What
were the consequences on the schedule? What were the consequences
on the experiment itself? (Did it perform as intended after the
fix or did it only hobble?) Why did they had highly trained
payload specialist if they were not given latitude to perform
fixes? You don’t need a physicist to push buttons on a schedule.
Did NASA let any further payload specialist who had this deep
connection with one of the experiments on? Were fixes performed
by the payload specialist a normal thing ever?
About half of these were answered in the story, so I don't know, maybe you skimmed it too quickly. Read it again?
As for the rest, the author of the article went to some lengths to explain why information is scarce: most of the crew members are no longer living, Wang won't comment, and NASA apparently prefers not to remark on such a sensitive topic.
It's still quite an informative article, even though (by the author's own admission) questions remain unanswered. If the alternative was to simply not publish the article, I think they chose correctly. I certainly know a lot more about the topic than I did before reading it, which is a fine metric.
But they could say: “oh, the actual incident is just a jumping
off point, the article is about the human factors
Two thoughts here. One: you seem to have made that connection on your own, so kudos! I guess they didn't need to say it. Two: I mean, how would you have liked them to be more explicit about this?
Journalism is a branch of literature. Some articles may be very short and straight-to-the-point, others longer to explain the context, with sometimes some subjectivity - see for instance "gonzo journalism".
Here, the author explains that while we broadly know what happens, there is no precise-written record about it. And the incident had long-lasting consequences. I enjoyed the article very much personally.
> the author explains that while we broadly know what happens, there is no precise-written record about it
The author implies that, but doesn’t say it outright. I for one can’t believe NASA doesn’t have reports and communications and debriefs saved in triplicate. Did they even try to FOIA for infomation, or just phoned around failed to get callbacks and shrugged?
>I for one can’t believe NASA doesn’t have reports and communications and debriefs saved in triplicate.
You know we are missing a significant amount of moon footage right? NASA doesn't archive 100% of everything because it barely has the budget to do it's actual mission.
“What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?
…
Space exploration has been a long dream for humans. Starting with Aristotle… (follows 2000 years of history with excruciating details)”
I enjoy watching how youtubers circle around while never, indeed, getting to the point. In a sense, the expectation they set in the title is not respected, but an excuse to listen to them for as long as they can stretch it.
It's actually a good story, but fuck me if I'm willing to sift through all the descriptions of the animal life. Jules Vern would take 10 pages to describe what someone else could in 1 paragraph.
I wouldn’t like that comment of yours if you had expanded it to 20,000 words long, even if there was a name and a Wikipedia article for that type of HN comment!
Is there a rule preventing an abstract from being added at the beginning of such an article? You know, just to understand rapidly whether the rest of the read matches your interest.
There's a difference between looking into the context around the issue, and filling the article up with endless irrelevant stuff like the weather on the day of the interview or a description of some person's apartment decorations, and often pages of this before you even learn what the point of the article is supposed to be.
This article had a clear subtitle that showed where the story is going: "If you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back." -- this immediately lets you know that this is about a specific incident (not a hypothetical scenario) and why the threat was made. It then proceeds to add new, obviously relevant information with each paragraph.
This felt like a good article, despite its length, but most "long-form" content is trash.
For a good portion of this article I thought the answer was “We don’t know”. It ambles around so leisurely and stop-start that it feels like reading ChatGPT output.
I feel like this long form article did a pretty good job. History bits were paragraphed so skipping ahead was trivial if a bit of history didn't interest you.
Also the answer happened relatively early when the flow lead to the answer rather than artificially rewriting the story to bury the lead.
And the continuation after made sense and didn't overstay its welcome.
Also when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back, he comes back and gets old and can't be reached for comment, but we can tell he came back because he's 83.
Thank you so much. I don’t always mind long form articles when they justify their length, but this one would have been better if it started with your summary, followed by the some nitty gritty details, followed by meta analysis interleaved with yet more nitty gritty details.
In both Sci-fi books and history, there's a situation where colonists get their own ideas, once they figure out they're no longer dependent on the mother country/home planet.
I hope this happens.
A cheaper and easier alternative to colonizing Mars to prevent losing all of the "human beans," if we should happen to smash the one bean jar, would be to colonize the Moon. The Moon is lacking in a lot of the elements needed to sustain human life, but in terms of orbits and energy, it's not that far from the asteroids where the rest of the elements could be found. It's also mere days away from Earth, so it would be practical to send a rescue mission if something happened, like the algae tanks all dying at once.
The moon might he a harsh mistress, but it might be an even harsher target for a space marine landing.
>> There are consequences for letting this kind of person fly...
What kind of person is that? How do you know? It seems NASA has a fairly rigorous psych evaluation for their astronauts, so even they aren't "sure" until they do the evaluation.
More of the article is about the hatch and how it has been locked on various missions because the crew didn't trust the payload specialist. I also learned that a Saudi prince flew on the space shuttle.
I don't hate the format of these articles in general but this one in specific had a harsh and abrupt transition between setting up the tension "Astronaut upset" and the segue to background check information. In my humble opinion it would benefit from another paragraph or two of setup.
Thank you. I got 1/3 of the way through and started wondering why I was struggling to get to the end. I backed out and checked the comments hoping to find exactly what you posted.
You missed the lede, which was that NASA designed the space station with a hatch that opened outward directly into space as an emergency exit. The story about the despondent scientist is just a wrapper for this.
I actually had a purpose behind the comment - which was - this is one thing AI would be good for. Why wasted 20 mins or whatever reading, when you could get ai to give you a summary of the thing? That would be a decent use of ai.
Mind you, I can surely imagine a plugin that allows you to click 'summarise this page' in the browser.
There are various versions of the story and I've no idea which (if any) are true.
However, in terms of the "kind of person", the key fact isn't whether they developed a blood clot in orbit, but what the correct response would be to that situation. I'd suggest that drilling holes in your spaceship isn't the recommended approach (if that is indeed what happened).
Guy builds an experiment, flies it, it doesn't work, requests more time to get it working, is denied, threatens 'not to come back', goes into a depression, worries crew that he'll open the door to space, eventually granted more time to work on the experiment, gets it working.
There are consequences for letting this kind of person fly and dealing with mental health while on a mission, but that's the basic plot.