We live in such a hyperliterate world, soaked and saturated in writing: on our machines, on the streets, on our television screens. It's just that writing doesn't live in the boxes that it used to. The genie is out of the bottle. But that just means that the magic could be anywhere.

If you look around at the news industry, there are more and more sites clamoring for that kind of writing, whether it's an Ideas section or personal essay series or longform. Readers are hungry for it. It's like prestige TV, though; it's execution-dependent. You have to figure out the right advertiser or sponsor, and you have to deliver, you can't just feed the beast.

I'm bullish on writing. Movies, radio, television, and now digital media - everything was supposed to push us away from text, to video or "back" to speech. First, there's no going back. We're always stumbling forward. Second, writing is invincible. Thirty years ago, we thought we'd all be talking to our computers; instead, we're all typing on our phones.

Technology is for us. All of us. People who carry things.

We live in such a hyperliterate world, soaked and saturated in writing: on our machines, on the streets, on our television screens. It's just that writing doesn't live in the boxes that it used to. The genie is out of the bottle. But that just means that the magic could be anywhere.