1 On the internet, more and more articles are written as lists. They are known as listicles. You've seen the kind of thing. Thirteen Surprising Bathroom Habits Of Tech Innovators. Twenty-three Ways You Should Definitely Not Attempt To Dance. Eleven Tips For A Hot Funeral Selfie. There are even whole websites, such as Listverse, containing nothing but listicles. Is the very fabric of written culture coming apart? Is global prose dissolving into a choppy sea of bite-sized jokey paragraphs? Is it because the listicle taps into some deep pleasure centre of the mind? Are lists a form of literary crack?
2 Internet content-farmers and media corporations hungry for cheap clickbait didn't invent the list as literary form. There have long been books presented as lists ("listooks"? No, me neither), such as The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or (in a way) Seven Types of Ambiguity. Poems, too, have sometimes taken list form ("listoems"?). Might Wallace Stevens's beautifully glancing "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" be the surprisingly high-culture ur-text of all modern listicle headlines? Also, the very foundation of Judaeo-Christian ethics is presented as a list: the Ten Commandments. Though Moses's famously severe listicle wouldn't fly so well online today: the trend is to use an intriguingly random-looking number rather than a neat 10.
3 Psychologically, the listicle is seductive because it promises upfront to condense any subject into a manageable number of discrete facts or at least factoids. When you embark on reading an ordinary article, you have no way of knowing how many things it will tell you. Maybe 15, maybe two. Frustrating. Plus, if you're reading online and it's more than a single screen long, you can't be sure when it's going to end. A listicle keeps helpfully informing you how much of it there is left. Great! You've now read three out of nine! Keep going!
4 I'll let you into a secret. A listicle is much easier to write than a regular article. I just have to think of each bit, and am blessedly free of the obligations to a) arrange them in a convincing sequence and b) deploy all the logical glue that sticks them together. Instead of "A, so B" or "A, but B", all I need to write is "A! B! Oh, and another thing, C!". It's very relaxing.
5 It would surely be an improvement to Homer's notoriously boring catalogue of ships in The Iliad if it were prefaced by a warning headline in the style of the website The Awl: "A Listicle Without Commentary of Seemingly Millions of People And How Many Boats They Brought With Them"?
6 A listicle is easier to read than an article; or at least, it's easier to read some of and then stop, without feeling any guilt about having not accompanied the writer to the end of her thesis – because there is no thesis. Listicles are thus perfect for skimming at bus stops. They are, essentially, themed compendia of micro-articles, each one self-contained. I suggest that we call each part of a listicle a particle. Generally, you will miss nothing by failing to read the last particle of a listicle. This listicle, of course, is a notable exception.
7 A listicle feels more democratic than a hierarchically structured argument, as well as more in tune with a conception of history and the world as just one damn thing after another. The foundational text of Protestantism was a listicle nailed to a church door: Martin Luther's "95 Theses" posted at Wittenberg. So it makes sense that in our culture, which makes a fetish of anti-authoritarianism, the listicle should have spread everywhere, like mould.
8 Lists are not necessarily anti-literary. If they lack complex structure, that lack is sometimes precisely the point. (Umberto Eco has even published a book-length listicle of lists, The Infinity of Lists.) One of the funniest lists in literature is also one of the most philosophically suggestive: Borges's celebrated taxonomy of animals in his essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins". All animals, Borges suggests, could be described as belonging to one or more of 14 categories, including "Those that belong to the emperor", "Embalmed ones", "Those that are included in this classification", "Those that tremble as if they were mad", "Those drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush" and "Those that, at a distance, resemble flies." Borges's list is a satire on the arbitrary nature of any attempt to order the world by corralling it into a list. But it also works rather wonderfully as a listicle.
9 I'm afraid I lied: this particle is entirely redundant and is only here to fill up the numbers.
