Hyperlinks please
On the eve of the US election, the New York Times published a punchy one paragraph editorial that deftly deployed hypertext to expand on its message. In case you missed it:
You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.
Jason Kottke delighted in the editorial’s trenchancy:
What makes this piece so effective is its plain language and its information density. This density is a real strength of hypertext that is often overlooked and taken for granted. Only 110 words in that paragraph but it contains 27 links to other NYT opinion pieces published over the last several months that expand on each linked statement or argument. If you were inclined to follow these links, you could spend hours reading about how unfit Trump is for office.
A simple list of headlines would have done the same basic job, but by presenting it this way, the Times editorial board is simultaneously able to deliver a strong opinion; each of those links is like a fist pounding on the desk for emphasis. Lies, threat, corruption, cruel, autocrats — bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! Here! Are! The! Fucking! Receipts!
How the links are deployed is an integral part of how the piece is read; it’s a style of writing that is native to the web, pioneered by sites like Suck in the mid-90s. It looks so simple, but IMO, this is top-notch, subtle information design.
David Gruber, equally delighted, added his commentary:
And now, 20+ years into writing Daring Fireball, I don’t really think of writing in hypertext as a special form of writing. It’s just writing. It’s non-hypertext writing that now feels slightly weird to me. Limiting.
It’s not that different a thing, being able to link words within one’s prose to other pages on the web. But it is different. Being able to apply italics or boldfacing to words is somewhat more expressive than being limited to un-styled plain text. Talented writers don’t need italics, but they can make good use of it if it’s available.1 Being able to add hypertext links to certain words is like that, but so much more powerful. Italic and bold emphasis are information-density additives. But as Kottke observes, used deftly, hypertext links are an information-density multiplier.
The way I’ve long thought about it is that traditional writing — like for print — feels two-dimensional. Writing for the web adds a third dimension. It’s not an equal dimension, though. It doesn’t turn writing from a flat plane into a full three-dimensional cube. It’s still primarily about the same two dimensions as old-fashioned writing. What hypertext links provide is an extra layer of depth. Just the fact that the links are there — even if you, the reader, don’t follow them — makes a sentence read slightly differently. It adds meaning in a way that is unique to the web as a medium for prose.
I do like a light dusting of hyperlinks. Too many, and it can quickly become overwhelming. I’m the kind of person who reads footnotes in books, and I generally tend to follow hyperlinks in web content if they are included.
With ebooks, hyperlinks enhance the reading experience. To name one example, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism deployed links to source material to good effect. I now mostly read ebooks as it’s much easier to follow links than in physical books.
It’s irritating when you see an allusion to something that exists on the web and there’s no link to it. It smarts of thoughtlessness towards readers, or worse, laziness. Do the work and make it easy for us to find whatever it is you’re referencing. It’s the web, the ability to hyperlink is one of the best things about it.
Co-author of the Madwoman in the Attic dies
Sandra Gilbert, co-author of the 1979 book The Madwoman in the Attic, died aged 87, on 10th November 2024. Gilbert wrote the seminal literary criticism second wave feminist text with Susan Grubar. It explores how 19th century female writers such as Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott and the Brontes, used similar imagery and female characters embodying madness and rebellion, to resist oppression and to demonstrate the social limitations the authors experienced as women.
Maureen Corrigan wrote about the Madwoman in 2013, when the National Book Critics Circle announced that Gilbert and Gubar were to receive its Lifetime Achievement Award:
To read The Madwoman in the Attic the first time round was thrilling — as though you’d been introduced to a secret code in women’s literature, hiding in plain sight…
Once you started looking at metaphors of confinement, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrated, you saw that novels like Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey and Middlemarch were jampacked with images of locked rooms and closets, dungeons and enclosures, as well as overbearing patriarch jailors. Also running through 19th century women’s novels and poetry were out-of-control characters, “maddened doubles [who] functioned as asocial surrogates for [more] docile [female] selves.” The most famous example of one of these doubles gave Gilbert and Gubar’s book its catch title: howling Bertha Rochester, imprisoned in her husband’s attic, giving vent to the forbidden feminist anger of plain Jane Eyre.
I borrowed a copy of the Madwoman in the Attic from the library in the early 2000s. It served as an instructive accompaniment to the stacks of 19th century classics I was reading at the time.
Gilbert and Grubar went on to become long term collaborators doing the necessary work of illuminating women’s lives through writing.
Defend institutions
The second lesson from Timothy Snyders’s twenty lessons on tyranny:
It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.
- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Prepare, prepare and prepare again
Failure is inherent in the game. Om Malik on life lessons from sport:
- Remember the basics, and do them well.
- Don’t take eye off the ball.
- It doesn’t matter how big or experienced you are, you gotta do your homework.
- And just when you think you know it all, you have to go back to the drawing board.
- You have to show up for the game (or any other situation in life) well-prepared. And by that, I mean you have to study hard.
- It doesn’t matter if you fail. At least you were well-prepared. In a way, that alone is a victory in itself.
Why? Even if you fail, at least you know you are doing your best. You are giving yourself the highest odds to win. That is a good place to start.”
- Om Malik, Why Failure is the best teacher
How to start personal blogging
When I first got interested in blogging, I didn’t know where to start. I only knew that I wanted to speak up and use my voice. I searched the internet, as you do, for advice on how to go blog successfully, and found suggestions such as “find your niche.” I imagine that’s great advice if you already have a niche, but I had no idea what I wanted to say in the first place, so locking in on a subject area seemed impossible and very, er, business-like.
What I was looking for, was advice on the step before finding your niche: how to build a writing practice as a way to find out what you think. It may feel counterintuitive, but I think, for this, you need a public space to play and experiment. In other words, you need a blog. Over time, you might find that a niche emerges. On the other hand, it might not, and that’s fine. What’s important is that you’re showing up regularly to create in your space and your goals are clear.
Perhaps the “find your niche” advice was not intended for people like me who are looking to nurture their nascent creativity and to learn something in the process. If what I’m saying resonates with you, allow me to:
point out that there is a step before “find your niche”.
give you the permission to play and explore what you think. It’s perfectly legitimate to create a blog with no niche to do this. This is what TheMindEx is. Eventually, your blog might morph into subject specificity, but for now, your only aim is to play.
Sometimes it takes someone saying that it’s o.k. to do the thing, for you to take notice.
Go play, figure some things out and do it in public. I promise you, someone will find your process useful and interesting.