Agreed, needed editing though I fully sympathize with the people in the author's story. The drug shithole I used to live in after prison was crackheads screaming for hours after blowing up pipes in their face when a rain drop hits it after they heat it up, crackheads getting robbed and fighting all night, shootings, constant ambulance and firetruck sirens for fentanyl ODs, my neighbours door being kicked in by a drug collector, or the sounds of an entire crew of garbagemen at 4am shoveling and scraping the street of needles, nothing but constant noise. Walking up in dead sleep to police banging their flashlight on your door asking if you want to be a witness to whatever drug murder happened while you were unconscious. The beautiful freedom when you move to the most remote part of a country and you can't hear a thing all night except a river rushing. Nobody screaming, nobody crying for hours on end, no arguements over petty bullshit. No pepper spray victims screaming no police blaring on their cruiser mic to clear the streets because they can't be bothered to exit the car, no fire alarms because your neighbor fell asleep while his crack burned away on the stove, no helicopters looking for somebody with a spotlight in your window.

What’s a drug collector? Or is that a typo. I just want to know what one is if there is a such a thing.

Like a debt collector but specifically for drug money.

And mama cooked the breakfast with no hog.

I know it sounds like bs. But here I am https://bc.ctvnews.ca/police-investigate-after-man-found-dea... and I was a witness in this trial my full name in court records avail to anybody https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-province/20080411/281...

you know who I am now, who are you?

I don't think that was the implication of the GP comment? I think it was just phonetically riffing off of the "no X, no Y" structure of the end of your comment, in reference to Ice Cube lyrics:

> No barking from the dogs, no smog, and mama cooked the breakfast with no hogs

I swear my brain was cooked living in that area too long. Excuse my cringeposting tangent

This. I have no problem reading a 8000+-page article if it's about a complex subject and I'm really learning things all the way through. But here, the signal-to-noise ratio is just too low. I could have learned the same in a quarter of the length.

In general, for me, articles where the first sentence talks about a particular person (meaning that they are going to tell a personal story to exemplify whatever issue they're talking about) are a red flag. They all feel samey and they are a waste of time to read. I wonder why that writing style is so common nowadays.

I did skim this one because I was particularly bored...

A lot of people like a story. The article writers want to write in story form. Personally, I'm with you. I've learned to scan these articles and try and extract the meat. It's like the literary version of eating sunflower seeds. Very inefficient.

//I wonder why that writing style is so common nowadays

Google sends more traffic to articles that capture the user attention.

> > Thallikar took his campaign to his homeowners’ association and to his neighbors. The response was tepid, though he did persuade one person to email the city.

> Which makes it seem like it's just the personal bugaboo of one person rather than a serious problem, and having read far too many words already I just want to give up.

Later on it tells that other people complained too, an organisation gets set up, the company replies, etc.

But yeah, I agree, too much narrative. Some is good, but this is too much.

I liked the structure and delivery. The writer tries to sound sympathetic and paint the complaints as genuine, but it's delibrately left vague whether the person was misunderstood or delusional judging by the reaction of everyone else in the story. The seek for vindication motivates the reader to follow the text and the payoff was very well executed towards the end.

I'm sorry you didn't like it but it doesn't take that long to read anyway. Maybe a Medium style "time to read" notice would have helped, but I just think people don't give long form content the respect it deserves.

I'm really glad you liked it! Perhaps I'm being too critical; but in any case not everyone must like something for it to have merit.

I usually really like long form journalism and am glad when I see it these days, but the payoff felt much lower than typical long form for me. There's so much good content these days that even though I wanted to learn about this topic, after several thousand words I didn't feel like there was enough signal to justify the noise. (Excuse the pun)

I had almost the opposite reaction. It was too long, but I didn't have any trouble figuring out what was going on (and guessing the ending). I was wondering what the purpose of the article was, given that it's perfectly obvious to me that modern life is too loud, corporations are usually to blame, and tend to refuse to clean up their act. Just listen! How can you not hear it?

This is a difficult topic to report on, because some people will not understand at all, and some people will not understand how others cannot understand. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground on this issue.

The real mystery is why they didn't use multimedia, which would be the perfect vehicle for this. Instead of (or in addition to) writing some poetry about noise, play some noise! Instead of describing the mathematical foundation of white noise, when you're at that part of the article, play some white noise! Alternate with sections of silence, which everyone will then be able to appreciate.

When you care about communicating a message, you've got to match the medium to the message. Otherwise you're not a reporter with an exposé. You're just a writer who wants to show off your clever writing.

I have been getting that feeling about some articles on the Atlantic in the recent months, poor editing resulting in overlong articles when the subject matter plainly does not require such confused and long winded treatment.

Also the mis-use of obscure vocabulary:

> In other words, it’s a data center—a columbarium for thousands of servers that store data for access and processing from virtually anywhere in the world.

I didn't know the word columbarium so I looked it up [1]. I don't think it's an appropriate word for this context and not good journalism. You could possibly stretch its meaning to describe a data centre in a poem or novel, but that's a different domain to journalism.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/columbarium

The article clocked in at 8900 words and had a vague click-baity 'tech industry' sub-title. Hard pass.

Jesus Christ that's longer than a novel chapter. What kind of conceited ass actually writes this and thinks it's good?

The article has a pretty clear "main story ->side info -> main story -> side info" structure. So I just read the main story parts and thought it was a pretty good read.

That's what I hate. I keep going back and forth skimming for names to try and parse what paragraph relates to what. I'd much rather read two separate articles for each thing.

Same thoughts as well. I just scrolled half way through to see what the person ended up discovering. The whole bit in between was infuriating.