I love The New Yorker. I actually read several pages of it every night to my wife to help her fall asleep. And that's not actually a joke about it being boring.

I love The New Yorker. I actually read several pages of it every night to my wife to help her fall asleep. And that's not actually a joke about it being boring. (Currently reading about the evidence for UFOs, it's highly interesting.) However, almost every article follows such a predictable format: Introductory section, full of all the interesting and tantalizing details, and stuff you actually want to find out about. Then section two: we jump back to the main subject's childhood, what clothes they were wearing when the journalist met up with them, how softly they speak. About two pages of biographical content. Section 3: we jump to the background of the story we're actually going to tell. Explain how it fits into the history of some movement or scientific question or whatever. The "point" of the article gets buried somewhere in sections 4 or 5, in between riffing on other people's dead ends and more biographical content.