“At roughly 31,000 words, the article is as long as a novella, roughly five times the length of a typical major magazine article.”

“Mr. Wright, a staff writer at The New Yorker for nearly three decades, initially turned in 76,000 words. “I have an appetite to go into depth,” he said in an interview. (He added, with a laugh: “I get paid by the word.”)”

—From the New York Times’ short note about the Lawrence Wright New Yorker piece on the pandemic.