The complex, long-form writers – but is anybody listening?
11 February 2026 Noel Wauchope, https://theaimn.net/the-complex-long-form-writers-but-is-anybody-listening/
I sympathise with readers who have a short attention span. I myself am one of those. And nowadays, well – that’s pretty much everybody.
And yet, people keep writing long, and very long, articles. Are they wasting their time? Who actually reads these articles?
I used to think that long articles were indeed a waste of time. And in a certain sense, I was right. I came from the angle of an antinuclear activist, and for a long time, the “nuclear debate” was run by highly – informed people, who made sure to use the absolutely correct technical language – no weak slips into ordinary talk. The anti-nuclear experts generally showed their opponents that they were right up there with the jargon that only experts understood. So the ordinary peasant, the general public, including many well-educated people, “dazzled by science” couldn’t really understand the long arguments. The result was that most people were intimidated, felt they could not understand it all. which was exactly the situation that the nuclear lobby wanted.
Then along came Dr Helen Caldicott, and mucked it all up. She understood all the technical stuff, and could write about that. But she also used ordinary, understandable language. And worse – heaven forfend – she sometimes was emotional. God, she even described some nuclear propagandists as “wicked”. Personally, I thought that the term was accurate. Anyway, Dr Caldicott copped a lot of flak, including even from the anti-nuclear lobby, with their obsession about being “respectable”. How dare she be so “hysterical”. But then she couldn’t help it, having the disability of being female.
But, Dr Caldicott, with her many books, public speaking, meeting world leaders, even influencing Ronald Reagan, got her message through to people, and the “debate, has never been the same since.
So, I rejoiced at this development, which did help journalists to loosen up, and cover nuclear issues in a more readable and human way. And in shorter articles.
But now the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of being short and easily digestible, especially with the communications monster of social media. It is a sad thing that probably only old people have the time and the inclination to read long articles.
And people are missing out, because often the full story on a subject is really covered only in long articles. I have a collection of these, on a variety of topics, and I had planned to reference a number of them here. Some are very densely written, full of facts, dates, events – and therefore really informative – but still a bit of hard work to read. And some show how very complex a situation can be – how there are two sides, and maybe more than two, to a story.
So, here are examples of very informative ones:
Planet Plastic: How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades, by Tim Dickinson.
US military action in Iran risks igniting a regional and global nuclear cascade, by Farah N. Jan.
Cumulative effects of radioactivity from Fukushima on the abundance and biodiversity of birds, by Timothy A Mousseau
Securing the nuclear nation, by Kate Brown
Very interesting are the articles which cover something in depth, showing contradictory sides, and how very complex a subject can be:
Some examples-
Betrayed: How Liberals Supported Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and Turned Against the Progressive Shah, by SL Kanthan,
The Long History Of Zionist Proposals To Ethnically Cleanse The Gaza Strip, by Mouin Rabbani.
And these can often be personal articles, about human conditions, character and integrity, leaving politics aside:
The heroes who saved the world from Chernobyl Two, by By Serhii Plokhy – also at The heroes who saved the world from Chernobyl Two.
Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule, by Ronan Farrow. Also at Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule, nuclear-news.
I hope that some people are reading long articles. Well, they must be, because some excellent movie documentaries and TV series often come up, and are derived from the written word. And perhaps many people are thus getting their longform stories in a different form. And perhaps some longform articles have a profound effect, even if it’s only on a relatively few readers.
The Siege Within: How Clarity Died in the Aftermath of Bondi
13 Feb 26, https://urbanwronski.com/2026/02/11/the-siege-within-how-clarity-died-in-the-aftermath-of-bondi/
The summer evening of December 14, 2025, began in the soft, amber glow of Hanukkah candles at Archer Park. It ended in the staccato rattle of rifle fire and the scent of sea spray mixed with shotgun powder. Fifteen lives were extinguished by Sajid and Naveed Akram; a night that exposed not only the fragility of security, but the deeper frailty of Australia’s political imagination.
In the wake of that horror, the Albanese and Minns governments promised resolve. What they delivered instead was the familiar choreography of risk-aversion: the committees, the taskforces, the talking-points, and finally, a version of the old dingo fence. What began as an act of collective grief has metastasised into a tinpot tyranny, a prison guard or police patrol’s vision of order.
From Public Grief to Private Fear
By February, that perimeter has hardened into a siege. Sydney’s once open streets have become the staging ground of a security politics that no one voted for. The images from Town Hall; men dragged from prayer mats, Greens MP Abigail Boyd coughing through pepper spray—belong to a country that has quietly rewritten its own story of tolerance. A pluralist democracy does not kneel beneath its police lines for long without losing something essential.
The truth is simpler and harder: we have allowed fear, dressed in the high-vis vest of “public order,” to set the terms of our morality, proscribe our speech, define the living sinews of our commonwealth.
The Invisible, Myopic Pragmatists
Who, then, is running this show? Increasingly it seems to be the invisible, myopic pragmatists; those faceless avatars of modern Labor who mistake managerial caution for moral intelligence. This is the small-target governance of realpolitik, the gutless risk-avoidance that flatters itself as prudence. Yet it turns out to be a type of costly false economy; in the refusal to confront or even name the deeper moral crises beneath Australian politics; it proves a costly wrong, right turn.
Labor still governs as if haunted by ghosts: of Murdoch’s tabloids, of Trump’s shadow, of talkback nationalism. So fearful of offending the pro-Israel lobby or a resurgent Washington, they have allowed Australia’s political stage to be colonised by a foreign narrative. It is one thing to host Isaac Herzog on a “healing tour.” It is another to pretend that such theatre constitutes diplomacy while Gaza still smoulders and UN inquiries speak of mass dispossession.
Under the banner of “social cohesion,” the government has transformed mourning into a managed event and dissent into security risk.
The Ritual of Control
January’s Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act is the latest iteration of this logic; a law that inflates “incitement” until speech itself becomes suspect. Under the euphemism of protection, dissent becomes pathology. This is governance as theatre: motion without moral movement, legislative vigour masking ethical paralysis.
Paul Keating warned of the “instant band-aid”—politics mistaking activity for achievement. The current government has perfected the art. It calls Parliament to ban protest chants overnight, but remains paralysed before the “recreational hunting” loopholes that armed the Akrams. You can now go to prison for carrying a certain flag, but not for stockpiling a .308 rifle under the name of sport.
The Day of Kettling
And so came February 9, the day that Albanese and Minns kettled not only citizens, but independence of mind itself. In those 24 hours, freedom of expression was pinned beneath riot shields, freedom of association shoved into police vans, and the rights of conscience, democracy, and common decency were trampled into the wet asphalt of George Street.
Australia has always prided itself on a kind of decent moderation; the belief that even in our disputes, there existed a shared moral floor. What unfolded yesterday suggests that floor has given way. The government’s instinctive use of force against non-violence didn’t merely reveal insecurity—it revealed contempt. For protest, for plurality, and for the ordinary intelligence of the public.
History will not remember this as a day of security. It will remember it as a day of surrender; the moment when a Labor government, raised on the language of solidarity, chose the comfort of coercion over the courage of care.
The Moral Reckoning
We are witnessing the normalisation of the riot shield as a symbol of civic order, a transformation as swift as it is insidious. When a government greets a vigil with chemicals and batons, it is not protecting its people. It is protecting itself.
True cohesion is never policed; it is nurtured. It grows when governments address inequality rather than manage optics, when they embrace dissent as a sign of health, not heresy. It exists in the old Australian compact between decency and fairness; an agreement far older than Parliament and infinitely more fragile.
Labor, if it still remembers, must left heel; breaking from the intellectual, moral and spiritual shipwreck of the Shoppies bloc and return to its real heritage: the workers and communities who built a nation out of solidarity, common care, and the stubborn conviction that a free people stand tallest when they stand together.
Until then, we remain a country barricaded from itself.
1 This month
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