[mercer]

While I do share your frustration most of the time, for some reason I've never felt it when reading a Brain Pickings post.

I'm not sure why, but I think it's because I know what to expect, and so when I do read one of these articles, my state of mind is to just kind of take in whatever idea is expressed, to click on the copious amount of links, and to write down the titles of any materials that seem interesting.

The style feels fitting for a blog/magazine that mostly seems to offer surface-level ideas, often interesting, with links and references to various source materials. It's a bit like the difference between actively using google/wikipedia/stanford encyclopedia of philosophy and passively clicking around on tvtropes.org.