Letter To The Editor

A few well-distilled thoughts from our colleague Russ Rymer:

It would be encouraging to think, as Jonathan Mahler contends in "When 'Long-Form' Is Bad Form" (Op-Ed, Jan. 25), that long-form writing is a "cult" so pervasive as to be the "journalistic environment we're living in." He suggests that it is so powerful that it may have led to a woman's death.

However, Essay Anne Vanderbilt, the closeted transgender woman supposedly victimized by bad narrative practice, could as easily have been hounded to suicide by a vicious tweet as by the somewhat longish article that Mr. Mahler cites.

Long form may be fetishized in hashtags and "artisanal" websites, but that, too, speaks to the form's embattled…