I was going to say the Ferris Bueller museum montage, since it's legitimately beautiful, but since steve already cited that one, I'll throw in Rocky 4's "Hearts on Fire" montage, since it's technically the pinnacle of improvement over time sequences. It's a different kind of beautiful.

Ah, thanks for checking up on me. I've corrected the errors. And, yeah, I'm kind of a stickler for not ending with a preposition, unless my goal is to strike an informal tone. Glad you enjoyed it. Looks like someone's already linked to it over at r/metareddit.

It's always heartening to hear that people miss Culture Ramp. I think I probably have editing in my blood, but it's been nice just working as a writer for a while. I've also had a few op-eds at Polygon, so you can catch me there every so often as well.

I think the Reddit founder was probably right about subreddits contributing to the site's popularity. Some of the most popular platforms on the Web are built on internal contradictions. It's part of what gives them traction, since it gives the platform a kind of problematic texture, something to work out. People love a puzzle.

Lack of criteria means this one is going to get a lot of answers that have nothing to do with one another. Which is, in part, an excuse for my answer: Richard M. Nixon in Secret Honor.

might his taking on big questions for large numbers of readers do more good than harm?

I doubt it. When you're writing for a popular audience, you're writing for an audience that wants to make up their mind about a particular subject based on your book. They're not likely to weigh it against other points of view, if for no other reason than that they're not likely to invest time in exploring those other points of view. After all, if they were interested enough in the subject to really explore it, they'd be reading about it already, and reaching out to them wouldn't do much to popularize the topic.

Naturally, there will always be a few people who progress from a popular text to a more extensive exploration of the topic, but for everyone else, the topic will tend toward fixation. Which only makes it more difficult for the next writer who happens to be presenting a better substantiated argument.

If you want to get right down to it, popularization isn't a monolith. Some writers are attempting to popularize the current state of knowledge about a subject in order to bring it to a wider swath of the population. Others are attempting to popularize their pet theory in order to sway a general audience who doesn't know the subject well enough to treat it as provisional or even dubious. After all, in any society where scientific research depends at least in part on public funding, popularization is a pathway to money.

In this case, it's probably a difference in city planning that enables it to happen in Europe as opposed to America.

Unfortunately, I suspect that the biggest factor is planning around automotive traffic v. planning around pedestrian traffic. That sort of public space is harder to maintain when people have to find a pay for parking for it. That's unfortunate because it's going to be very difficult to undesign our reliance on cars.

Personally, I think they should be doubling down. Quality long form is one thing the aggregation heavy news sites have a very hard time doing. It's clearly a way the old bastions of journalism can continue to set themselves apart.