You and just about everyone else think the past, present and future of the Web lies in brevity, in ever-shorter bursts of expression, if not coherence and meaning. Texts and tweets and Facebook postings? The digital world is sinking in pithiness.

Mark Armstrong is going in the other direction.

As the founder, proprietor and chief “curator” (the digerati’s up-market word for “editor”) of
Long­reads.com, Armstrong is invested in the lengthy, the luxuriant, the thoughtful and the contemplative. Armstrong hunts up the best magazine and newspaper articles of more than 1,500 words he can find and highlights three to five of them a day on his site, offering an eclectic collection of writing that stands as a kind of daily rebuke to the 140-
character culture.