1. I've never heard that joke. It's pretty funny. Also nerdy to an incredible degree. Woody Allen would have been a nobody if he had come around a decade later, lol.
2. Am I missing something here. How can a poster who calls himself Leo Bloom be so concerned with narrative?
3. I think the "studies show" issue you're pointing out is more a reflection of new media than anything. I've observed that articles in publications like slate, vox, 538 -- they are all getting shorter. Considerably. I don't know what's causing it. I'm guessing that they are paying less per piece, but I'm not sure that's the whole explanation. A guy like Ian Millheiser at Vox doesn't really write his column for the money, and even if he does, I doubt very much it took him more than half an hour (if that) to write the paragraph or two that seems now to be missing relative to his other work.
I'm guessing that the publications are themselves imposing a policy of reduced word counts. Serving a 3 paragraph article to a browser costs the same as a 30 paragraph one, so I'm thinking that they are insisting on lower word counts one of these reasons: a) they want a policy of uniformity in length, so that one person's longer articles don't make shorter articles look insubstantial by comparison; and/or b) they want to slim down their editorial staff and that requires a lower word count.
In any case, I'm not sure I would hold the lack of detail against the article, or even the journal.
