Seeking some informed opinion on some aspect of human society, culture, or politics, that is not rooted in received or polarised social media 'wisdom', but not too keen on ploughing through a dense tome? Try a range of public intellectuals, usually academics, who weigh in on such matters, but in a simple and terse form like Italian scholar Umberto Eco.
In this particular form, you don't need to read his entire book and even if you do, it will offer an expansive buffet of ideas and thoughts, rather than a single interminable meal centred on one theme.
Human ingenuity shows itself at its best in constructing forms of expression for communication, edification, or entertainment, it is even better at progressively curtailing their span, as down the ages, or even mere generations, attention spans shorten or there are other calls on people's time.
In written forms, sagas evolved into novels and novels into short stories, epics into poetry, letters into e-mails and then into SMSes/chats, and in the audio-visual realm, films into serials and even into "reels" or other forms of short videos, and so on.
As far as the written word is concerned, even non-fiction especially the one with insights into various facets of the human condition, but usually in rather bulky volumes and/or containing some impenetrable language or an entirely new vocabulary, does not escape this process.
This form is much shorter,
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