[mattmanser]

It's a shame you feel that way as articles like this were extremely common 30 years ago in the Saturday and Sunday papers. And I do miss them.

I wonder if it's a generational thing, where now every essay must focus on one idea instead of taking a meandering path of curiosity to the author's final point.

[randallsquared]

I agree with you that this is a Parade-level essay, and I think those were always basically fluff: enough to give a sense that something had been learned about two or three seeming-disparate topics from a great distance, but not enough to actually satisfy curiosity about any of them. In the 80s as a pre-teen, those were the first part of the Sunday paper I claimed, but they never did more than whet.

I don't think it's even about staying on one topic. It's just that the topics were too broad for such a short essay, even had it been relatively dense, and then to that problem the author added long phrases where a short phrase would do, as if trying to pad the length to some predetermined mark.