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 fe

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.