Studies are suggesting (I won’t bore you with a list of citations) that more and more people are beginning to demand more from writing. There are, and it pains me to say, dissertations suggesting that writing seeks to evoke a response of heart and soul, not mind and intellect. These are saying that the era of the think piece, the data driven reporting, the academic cunning, are a thing of the past. There’s a growing constituency that seems enthralled by the very ordinary and very local—personal and particular stories by which the universal scope of experience can come flooding through. And believe me, this will be a fad. It will not last.
I’ve been saying recently that much nonfiction writing would be improved if we dropped our senseless prohibition against first-person perspectives, stopped camouflaging individual viewpoints behind the drab patterns of omniscient narrative, and simply offered up our reflections for whatever they are worth. Nadeau seems to have the same idea in mind, but he says it in a much funnier way. You should check it out.