"We crave stories – all cultures do – but we also crave facts"

I'm in love with Gerry Marzorati's 2009 speech on long-form magazine writing.

"What brought long-form magazine writing  into being in America was, I would argue, the essentially empirical and pragmatic nature of our culture – its distaste for, and distrust of, abstraction and ideology. Ours is a huge land and one of constant change.  It is a fluid nation where class divisions are never static – which has made it a tough place to write as Balzac and Zola wrote. We crave stories – all cultures do – but we also crave facts. Lots of facts. And facts are more compelling, easier to digest, when arranged narratively."

Yup.