Reading notes: 'Oranges'

Oranges is a book wherein John McPhee, having done tons of research, writes a bunch of stuff about oranges. Some notes: There's a certain register that McPhee shares with David Halberstam, David Quammen, and others: it's friendly but authoritative, and it welcomes the reader but expects a careful one. The weight and rhythm of each sentence shows obvious care, often from an editor at The New Yorker or the New York Times. This was a well-known and -loved subgenre of nonfiction, and when you picked up a high-quality magazine you expected to find an essay or two written in this style. This subgenre is dying or dead, and not just because fewer writers are competent in it and fewer outlets are willing to publish (and, especially, pay for) it. Genre is defined in large part by the reader's expectations,1 and readers do not expect to read a hundred pages about oranges without an explicit argumentative or ethical purpose. If you published a text like this (or even this text verbatim) today, it…