Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: When you’ve been saving up a lot of anger, and you want to spend it stylishly and well, listing is your best friend. Listing allows a writer to organize and compress her many grievances instead of spewing them about and making herself, like Sarah Palin, an object of satire.

Listing makes you look rational, and your grievances plausible. Inside you’re raging, but your calm and systematic prose suggests that your rage is not composed of inchoate superficial and personal stuff; rather, what’s bugging you amounts to a coherent indictment of something real, with large and shared implications.

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Consider some introductory paragraphs from David Remnick’s recent New Yorker piece on Trump. SOS will highlight each list.

It was all so funny once. For a long time, Trump, with his twenty-four-karat skyscrapers, his interesting hair, and his extra-classy airline, was a leading feature of the New York egoscape. The editors of the satirical monthly Spy covered him with the same obsessive attention that Field & Stream pays to the rainbow trout. Trump never failed to provide; he was everywhere, commandeering a corner at a professional wrestling match, buying the Miss Universe franchise and vowing smaller bathing suits and higher heels. You could watch him humiliate supplicants on “The Apprentice” and hear him on “The Howard Stern Show” gallantly describing the mystery of Melania’s bowel movements (“I’ve never seen anything — it’s amazing”) and announcing that, “without even hesitation,” he would have had sex with Princess Diana. As early as 1988, Trump hinted at a run for the White House, though this was understood to be part of his carny shtick, another form of self-branding in the celebrity-mad culture.

And now here we are. Trump is no longer hustling golf courses, fake “universities,” or reality TV. He means to command the United States armed forces and control its nuclear codes. He intends to propose legislation, conduct America’s global affairs, preside over its national-intelligence apparatus, and make the innumerable moral and political decisions required of a President. This is not a Seth Rogen movie; this is as real as mud. Having all but swept the early Republican primaries and caucuses, Trump — who re-tweets conspiracy theories and invites the affections of white-supremacist groups, and has established himself as the adept inheritor of a long tradition of nativism, discrimination, and authoritarianism — is getting ever closer to becoming the nominee of what Republicans like to call “the party of Abraham Lincoln.” No American demagogue –– not Huey Long, not Joseph McCarthy, not George Wallace –– has ever achieved such proximity to national power.

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List, list, O list! Lists within lists (re-tweets conspiracy theories and invites the affections of white-supremacist groups, and has established himself as the adept inheritor of a long tradition of nativism, discrimination, and authoritarianism)!

And how does Remnick avoid turning this essay into the dreary recitation of one list after another? He varies the way he presents them. He breaks them up with humor (trout), anecdotes, quotations. He packs each of his paragraphs with all sorts of things – history, neologisms (egoscape), fresh similes (as real as mud), and fun alliteration (mystery, Melania, movements, amazing).

Indeed, if SOS could take Melania’s bowel movements out of that parenthesis and propose a simile of her own:

Good writing is like Melania’s feculence. It is the product of someone who has gone to the trouble of secreting herself in a private room and thoughtfully shaping what must be expressed into something solid and not off-putting.