Wow, this article is absolutely unreadable. As an example,
> In this case, though, I’ll indulge just a little because, although a newcomer to the country, I am an old-comer to the culture: my mother-in-law, still with us at ninety-five, is as Icelandic as could be and, although Canadian Icelanders are not exactly the same as the homespun kind, they are still almost indistinguishable from the natives.
So many non-essential dependent clauses. Every other sentence is like this: fifty sentences and over one hundred commas. Who thinks this is good style?
Prose of this style is common at The New Yorker. And since Gopnik has been writing it there since I was in diapers, I have to think he knows some things about writing that neither you nor I do. Furthermore, given the publication's legendary reputation for fact-checking and extremely high standards in journalistic integrity, I would reconsider your stance of rejecting the article before seeing if there is anything to be learned from it. After all, complicated sentence mechanics can be (1) intentional and considered or (2) accidental, revealing unclear, half-formed thoughts. In this case, I believe it is the former.
Taking into account the proclivities and interests of the Hacker News audience, perhaps you would be interested in reading an excellent, recent profile of Apple's Jony Ive at The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-co...
This kind of writing is more amenable to slow reading than quick skimming. Try reading it aloud, pausing at each comma and colon, it reads quite nicely.
I encountered this kind of style very often when reading French classics of the 19th century. I'm French BTW, and the modern mantra of "sentences must be short and convey only one idea" is still not as strongly followed here as it seems to be in the US.
> In this case, though, I’ll indulge just a little because, although a newcomer to the country, I am an old-comer to the culture: my mother-in-law, still with us at ninety-five, is as Icelandic as could be and, although Canadian Icelanders are not exactly the same as the homespun kind, they are still almost indistinguishable from the natives.
So many non-essential dependent clauses. Every other sentence is like this: fifty sentences and over one hundred commas. Who thinks this is good style?