Consider Brian Mockenhaupt’s feature, “The Living and the Dead,” published last year by the digital platform Byliner (and chosen by the American Society of Magazine Editors as one of the year’s best examples of magazine writing). One of the first things you might notice as you begin to download it, and then keep on downloading it, is that, for a feature story, it is really, really long. But I defy you to find a wasted word among the 22,000 that Mockenhaupt assembled. Length here is not a virtue in itself; it is, like a notebook or a computer or curiosity, a writer’s tool, one that Mockenhaupt deploys, as he does the others, to maximum effect. As we follow a marine platoon on its rounds in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, details accrete, characters deepen, drama builds. We witness, over time, the shocking and more subtle consequences of abrupt twists in the action. (This is why length is so important in baseball, too, by the way.)

Among the paradoxes of this era, when commercial travails are menacing the most costly forms of reporting, is that we have coincidentally produced maybe the greatest generation of war correspondents in the country’s history. It’s instructive to read Mockenhaupt’s piece against another of the most celebrated features of last year, Dexter Filkins’s haunting memoir of war, “Atonement,” for insights into storytelling technique and into the depth of experience these reporters have gained from so many years covering war. Mockenhaupt, an Iraq War veteran, vanishes into his story. His reporting is so precise, so knowing, that he never uses the first person to describe what he’s witnessed. Filkins, on the other hand, is central to his tale. Ten years ago he was there, in Baghdad, after Fox Company, Second Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment accidentally opened fire on a family fleeing a scene of fighting. Filkins chanced to meet the survivors, and he wrote about the family back then for The New York Times. So it was to Filkins, years later, that one of the guilt-wracked marines turned in hopes of finding the family, to explain himself and seek understanding, maybe forgiveness. Filkins ultimately helped arrange a meeting, and then, in The New Yorker, summed up the costs of war by telling this story of one veteran’s, and one family’s, braided pain.

Here’s a taxonomic riddle for you: How is it that a piece of fiction comparable in length to either of these “long-form” features is known as a “short” story? Stephen King’s “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation,” which won the National Magazine Award last year for fiction, justifies its label’s emphasis on relative brevity—and further underscores the obtuseness of that other label—by delivering many of the satisfactions of a novel in a fraction of the length. It is a marvel of compression. We meet an ordinary, sad man on an ordinary, sad errand—taking his father out of his nursing home for lunch. With just a few brush strokes, King portrays a son feeling abandoned as his father slips away into dementia. And then this seemingly quiet tale takes a shocking turn that affirms the resilience of the father’s love for his child. Too many short stories these days, I think, read like writing exercises. You can admire the craftsmanship without feeling moved; you can respect the psychological insight while wondering why nothing ever seems to happen. King’s story—comic, dramatic, poignant, revelatory—is a reminder of the potential power of this form to entertain and provoke.