A modest proposal for the reader who is tired of being shouted at: a quiet page, an unhurried sentence, and the assumption that you came here to think.
There is a particular pleasure, almost forgotten, in the experience of an argument that does not raise its voice. The page you are reading is an attempt to recover that pleasure: to make a small, well-tempered case for the considered sentence, the named source, and the patient reader.
We are not against speed. We are against the conflation of speed with seriousness, and of volume with truth. The faster the cycle, the louder the megaphone, the smaller the question seems to become. We propose, modestly, the opposite arrangement.
rational.today is published in the manner of a broadsheet because the broadsheet, for all its flaws, embodied a contract: the editor would not waste your time, and you, in turn, would give the page your attention. We intend to keep that contract.
Our editorial premises are few and stated plainly. Reason is a public craft, not a private possession. Disagreement, conducted carefully, is the engine of understanding and not its enemy. Evidence has a grammar, and that grammar can be learned. A correction is not a defeat; it is the point.
What follows below the fold is not breaking news. It is the slow news: longer pieces on argument, on method, on the books we have been reading and the letters we have received. We invite you to read at the pace the page was set.
Continued in column three —
The columns flow as columns once flowed: top to bottom, then across. The rules between them are thin and grey, the way they were when paper was scarce and ink was dear. We have kept the conventions because the conventions work. They tell the eye where to go without saying a word.
The largest type on the page is not the largest claim; it is simply the masthead, doing the small civic job of telling you what you are looking at. The second largest is the question we are asking today. Everything else, by design, is the answer.
“The considered sentence is the smallest unit of public reason; everything we publish is built from it.”
We have set ourselves a single typographic discipline: nothing on this page is here for decoration. Every rule between the columns separates two columns. Every headline introduces an article. Every drop capital marks the beginning of an argument that will end.
In which we argue, against the prevailing wind, that the page should set the pace, and the reader should be permitted to keep it.
Attention is not a resource we are running out of. It is a faculty we have been training, daily, against itself. The medium teaches the muscle, and the muscle, for the moment, is twitchy. The remedy is not despair. It is rehearsal.
Slow reading is not a posture. It is a method. One reads a paragraph; one looks up; one asks whether the paragraph said what one believes the paragraph said. If it did not, one returns to the paragraph. The page is patient; it has nowhere to be.
It will be objected that we have less time than ever. Less time than what? The accountant has the same hours as the philosopher; the difference is in the disposition of the hours. We propose, again, the small civic act of disposing of fifteen of them, daily, toward a difficulty that will not yield to a glance.
Consider the footnote. It is the unfashionable cousin of the citation, and the polite enemy of the bald assertion. A footnote says: the reasoning continues, but in a quieter voice, for those who care to follow. The page that contains footnotes is a page that respects the reader's right to verify.
“A page without footnotes is a confidence trick performed at speed.”
We will use them generously, and place them at the foot of the page where they belong, not at the bottom of an article where they are easy to ignore. They are not ornament. They are the receipts.
Slow reading produces, in time, the slow argument: the case made carefully, with named sources and conceded ground. We do not promise that every piece in this paper will be slow. We promise that the slow ones will be unembarrassed.
There is a final objection, and it is the strongest. The world burns; one ought to attend to the smoke. We do not disagree. We hold that the smoke is best attended by readers who have practised, in advance, the difficult art of telling smoke from cloud. The slow page is not a refuge from the world. It is the gymnasium for the citizen who intends to remain in it.
We invite the reader, then, to a small experiment. Read this section to its end. Then read it again. Note where, on the second reading, your understanding sharpened, and where it dimmed. The page has not changed; you have. That is the experience the broadsheet was built to deliver, and that this paper intends to keep delivering, daily, for as long as it has something to say.
— The Editors
The footnote is the conscience of the page. It is where the writer admits, in a small voice, that someone else got there first; or that the claim is contested; or that the citation is partial; or that the reader, if she wishes, may verify. Pages without that small voice are pages without conscience.
We will use four kinds of note: the citation, which gives the source1; the qualification, which limits the claim2; the aside, which honours an objection3; and the cross-reference, which points to a sibling argument elsewhere on this page4. Each is set in Source Serif 4 at a smaller size, and ruled off by a thin line above.
It is no defense of one's claim to surround it with a great wall of citations. The wall must be load-bearing. A footnote that does not change the reader's confidence in the claim is a footnote that should not be there. Decoration in the apparatus is the surest sign of decoration in the argument.
We have, accordingly, instructed our contributors to footnote sparingly and well. The page is better for it. The reader is better for it. The argument, when it survives, is better for it.
Six rules, none of them new, all of them difficult, gathered for the reader who would like to argue better and lose, occasionally, on purpose.
If you cannot state your opponent's argument in a form your opponent would recognise and approve, you have not yet earned the right to disagree with it. Begin there. The exercise is humbling, and the humility is the point.
Every argument rests on something it does not, in the moment, defend. Say what those things are. The reader will trust you more for the candor, and you will think more clearly for the discipline.
Many disagreements are not disagreements about claims; they are disagreements about how the evidence bears upon them. Make that boundary visible. The conversation will narrow, and narrowing is progress.
If your case requires that no rival case has merit, your case is too strong. Identify, in writing, the conditions under which you would change your mind. If you cannot, the position is a posture.
Heat in the prose is heat the reader must subtract before reading the argument. Save the heat for the rare moment when the argument requires it. Most arguments do not.
Errata are not embarrassments to be buried. They are the visible operation of the method. A page that prints its corrections in small type at the foot of the next-to-last column is a page that has not yet understood why corrections are printed at all.
A short shelf of patient books, none new, all useful, recommended without ceremony.
The locus classicus of the argument that an opinion held without engagement with its rival is barely held at all. Read for the second chapter, on the suppression of discussion, which has not aged.
An essay, not a book, but worth a shelf. Six rules for prose that are, by accident, six rules for thought. The shorter words remain better than the longer ones; the rule has not faded.
A patient catalogue of the means by which the credulous mind is led astray, and of the small civic disciplines that keep one upright. The chapter on the “baloney detection kit” is the apparatus we have argued for, in plainer dress.
A synthesis of forty years' research on the systematic missteps of the unaided mind. To know one's biases is not to be free of them; it is, however, to be able to ask the page to compensate.
A defense of explanation as the engine of progress, written by a physicist who has earned his polemical voice. Read, especially, on the difference between a good explanation and a merely plausible one.
A small selection of correspondence, lightly edited for length, printed with the writers' permission and our standard apologies for any retained errors.
Sir, — You write of the slow page as though haste were a vice, but the urgent matters of our age will not wait upon a leisurely paragraph. Your considered sentence is, in another light, a luxury that no one outside the comfortable classes can afford.
It is the cheap edition that liberates the reader, not the broadsheet.
— A. Patel, Birmingham
Mr Patel's letter has the better of half our argument. We do not deny that haste has its uses, nor that the leisure of the considered page is unequally distributed. We deny only that the remedy for that inequality is a still cheaper, still louder, still hastier page.
Our wager is the reverse: that the slow page, freely available, repays even the brief visitor in proportion to the time given.
— The Editor
The choice of Playfair Display for your masthead is a confession of nostalgia rather than design. A revival of a transitional serif at ninety-six pixels is not, as your editorial seems to suppose, a return to first principles. It is a costume.
A grotesque at the same size would have served the same severity, and asked less of the reader's eye.
— Dr. K. Nakamura, Kyoto
Dr. Nakamura is right that we have made a choice with a history, and wrong that having a history is, by itself, a fault. The costume is also the uniform; the reader who reaches a page set in this manner reaches it knowing what kind of page it intends to be.
We thought it kinder, on balance, to put the page in the kind of clothes that announce themselves.
— The Type Editor