You make a very good point. At times I think to myself that the column starts off a lttle slow but the further into it the better it gets.
I wrote a paper in graduate school about “the demise of journalistic storytelling.”
Everything needs to be encapsulated in a title, subtitle, by-line, or the first sentence of an essay anymore. It’s tragic how short everyone’s attention span has become.
I think back to Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn and the absolute walls of text, page to page, very few page breaks, but you are so engrossed in the narrative that you don’t notice.
Nowadays kids stop reading if there are more than 3 lines of text.