Why are the Zuckerbergs here? What are they doing? Follow the lede to find out

Jeremy Stern introduces his fifteen-thousand word essay, published in Colossus, about Meta CEO, and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, with a lede so succinct it must be the envy of any writer: There they are. The Zuckerbergs. Ledes, also called hooks, are a brief sentence that entices someone to read a newspaper or magazine article. The longer the piece, the more important the hook. They were something I struggled with during my extremely short career a freelance newspaper writer. I was fortunate to be working with an editor who helped me out a little. “Try again,” he’d say, patiently after I sent through idea after idea. The rest of what I’d written was fine, but it took awhile to get the first line right. But Stern’s lede is a classic. Even though I know who the Zuckerbergs are (or thought I did; take a look, you’ll see what I mean), I still wanted to read on to learn just where the Zuckerbergs were, and what they were doing there. But Stern’s Zuckerberg write-up is replete with…