What you can and cannot do in a blog

In an interview with Newsweek published about nine months ago - a reference that tells you, incidentally, all you need to know about my current level of organization - Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos offered the following thoughts on blogs:

"I believe that we learn different things from long form than we learn from short form. Both are important. If you read The Remains of the Day, which is one of my favorite books, you can't help but come away and think, I just spent 10 hours living in an alternate life and I learned something about life and about regret. You can't do that in a blog post."

True dat, Jeff - unless it's something about regretting to quote you, in a timely fashion, until most of a year had passed. Perhaps a blog post can communicate that, too. But let's look, for just a second, at the flip side of your claim in slightly greater detail. Can long form writing offer a pleasure as succinct and as easily quickly accessed by distant grandparents as, say, this:

Novels and blogs: both have their niche.