Ms. DeWitt.

The first time Helen DeWitt disappeared was in 2000.

Her debut novel, The Last Samurai, was on the verge of becoming a publishing sensation. It would eventually sell more than 100,000 copies in English and be translated into 20 languages. People told Ms. DeWitt she was a star. Tina Brown, the owner of Talk Miramax Books—the short-lived publishing imprint of her short-lived Talk magazine—wanted to throw her a big release party at the office. Ms. DeWitt did not believe she could handle that. She thought she was going insane and she told everyone as much. “I tell people I try not to go insane,” she said last month over coffee in a diner by Penn Station, a few hours before catching a plane back to Berlin where she currently lives. “And they think it’s funny and then I go insane and they get mad.”

She made it through to the end of the party. She was living in England at the time and had flown in for the occasion, but before that she had put her affairs in order. She gave away her clothes and put her books in storage. She went to the Talk party on Nov. 29, 2000, and after a few days, she left. She got on a train—“my body got on a train” is the way she puts it—got off in New Haven and checked into a hotel. How she spent her days is anyone’s guess. When she speaks about it today, she makes vague allusions to Niagara Falls. She was gone for about two weeks and ended up at her mother’s in a suburb of Washington, D.C. She fired her agent, returned to England and put off trying to sell her second novel.

That novel was called Lightning Rods, and it came out two months ago, with the much smaller press New Directions. She tried at various points over the past decade, but Ms. DeWitt could not get the book published before then. The book should have seen the light of day almost 10 years ago, when it was bought—after lengthy negotiations—by Jonathan Burnham, Ms. DeWitt’s editor and the editorial head of Talk Miramax. He bought the rights and paid Ms. DeWitt her advance, but the novel never surfaced.

Lightning Rods is about a salesman named Joe who fails to sell a single Encyclopedia Britannica and sells exactly one Electrolux vacuum cleaner. He realizes the problem isn’t with him. The problem is with other people. He needs to sell “something people knew they needed anyway.” He sets up a business of contracted female administrative assistants—nicknamed Lightning Rods—that have anonymous sex with the male employees in an office through a glory hole in the bathroom. He says he can convince people that this is a substitute for ordinary sex, and a way of guarding against workplace sexual harassment. The idea sweeps the nation and changes everything. Ms. DeWitt gives the last word of her novel to George Washington: “In America anything is possible.”

Many writers have gone mad trying to finish a manuscript, but Ms. DeWitt, who has a history of depression, is one of the few to lose her mind from the process of trying to publish one. The industry beat her down and wore her out. Mr. Burnham said she was “completely enveloped” in every detail of Last Samurai—from the choice of type to the layout of the page. It drove her to the edge. Like Lightning Rods, Last Samurai had also been bought by one publisher—Rebecca Wilson at Weidenfeld—before being published by another. After reading Ms. Wilson’s comments on the manuscript—“crap comments,” Ms. DeWitt says—she wrote to her agent, Stephanie Cabot, then at William Morris, and said she would commit suicide if she had to keep working with her. She then wrote to Ms. Wilson, thanked her for her comments and informed her she was going away to work on other books. She wanted to “protect her book from the publishing process.” She retreated to a house in Chesterfield in the north of England and started a number of novels; Lightning Rods was the first that she finished.

She wrote it, she said, because she “felt like she was getting fucked from behind through a hole in the wall” by the publishing industry.

Ms. DeWitt was born in 1957. She has platinum blond hair and a youthful face made more girlish by thick-rimmed glasses. She earned her PhD in classics at Oxford, where she wrote her doctorate on propriety in ancient literary criticism, but gave up her academic career in 1988 when she was finishing a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in Arabic poetics. She has varying degrees of fluency in multiple languages, including French, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Russian.

This knowledge informed her debut, which some critics read as a novel about translation. The protagonist of The Last Samurai, Ludo, is an unusually bright boy who is raised by his mother; as a substitute for his absent father, she has him watch Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai (the book’s original title), about a village that hires seven ronin samurai to guard them against bandits. Ludo’s mother refuses to reveal his father’s identity, so he goes on a search for him. The book is a linguistic and aesthetic triumph, seamlessly weaving Greek, Japanese and various other languages into the narrative framework. For that reason, Ms. DeWitt was very particular about the book’s punctuation and typesetting. Greek, with its subtle and significant use of varying accents turns to gibberish if not printed correctly.

In 1998, after Last Samurai’s first deal with Weidenfeld went sour, Ms. DeWitt retreated to the English countryside to write more books; she had given up hope on selling her debut right away. She was at work on several novels, keeping tabs on them by maintaining an elaborate spreadsheet of each manuscript’s title with a word count next to it and the date she expected it to be finished. If she wrote 2,000 words in one day on a given manuscript, she would adjust the date accordingly. After about 10 months, she had finished Lightning Rods. She showed the book to Mr. Burnham at Miramax before she showed him Last Samurai. He wasn’t thrilled by it so she showed him her other book.

“Helen thought Lightning Rods would be very easy to sell and Last Samurai would be very difficult,” Mr. Burnham said. “But I felt that The Last Samurai was a masterpiece.”

He took the novel to the Frankfurt Book Festival, where his hunch proved correct: it quickly became apparent that Last Samurai would be the breakthrough novel of the season.

Ms. DeWitt was looking for an editor who was an intellectual equal and who understood the value of her words. In Mr. Burnham she found someone who at least would give her a contract guaranteeing her the final say on usage. This is very rare. Writers write and editors edit. That is how the publishing industry works. But Ms. DeWitt thought the only way she would remain sane was if she could get Last Samurai into print in two months. She made her final changes to the book’s punctuation and style and sent it off to the copy editor. When she received the 600-page manuscript with the copy editor’s proofs, Ms. DeWitt’s edits had been covered over with whiteout. There were hundreds of changes. “O.K.” was spelled out “okay,” “15” was “fifteen” and so on. “I am Helen DeWitt,” she said. “I wrote this book. You want to write OK as o-k-a-y go write your own novel.” She admits it sounds trivial, but Mr. Burnham himself called her “one of the great talkers and one of the great readers of our time.” She is careful and possessive with her words. Ms. DeWitt had not made a photocopy of her initial edits and had to painstakingly redo them.

“If they had sent a team to my house,” she said, “and just taken a truncheon and smashed my computer and taken my books and stripped the place bare, people would see that as outrageous. But if they just kill the mind that wrote the book, they don’t see that as bad. The point is, once something goes wrong in this particular business, it is very hard to make right.”

It was at this time, near the beginning of 2000, when Ms. DeWitt began to entertain the thought of suicide.

“Joe was the first to admit that he made a lot of mistakes when he started out,” Ms. DeWitt writes in Lightning Rods. “He worried about all the wrong things.” One of his biggest mistakes, Joe says, was thinking that the hardest part would be finding women who would agree to have anonymous sex with their co-workers through a hole in the bathroom wall: not two weeks went by before he’d talked 19 women into believing they were right for the job. The problem was that sex in a bathroom stall felt “clinical and impersonal.” He considers solving this problem by having the woman leave her skirt on so the man can hike it up, but that would compromise the anonymity. He realizes the whole aesthetic is off. For one thing, the toilet would have to go. Joe “seriously underestimated the time he was going to need to get this baby off the ground.”

In 2001, when Ms. DeWitt was living in London, recovering from the depression that had prompted her earlier disappearance, Mr. Burnham had a change of heart about her second book. He made an offer, but Ms. DeWitt turned it down. She didn’t want to deal with the publisher’s world rights department a second time, which was claiming she was still $75,000 in the red for Last Samurai. Mr. Burnham upped the offer to a $525,000 advance for two books. This went back and forth for a while, with Mr. Burnham coming down in the price and eventually offering $400,000 for two books. In addition to Lightning Rods, Ms. DeWitt had proposed a book about poker. “Dealing with the publishing industry was a game of poker,” she said. “Not bridge, where you gather information and use it. It’s a game of lies.”

They negotiated a detailed contract offering Ms. DeWitt technical support for the poker book. The design was to be very specific. But the support never happened. Miramax was breaking up. The lawyer who helped draft the contract, Dev Chatillon, left without briefing Mr. Burnham on it. Ms. DeWitt told him Miramax was in breach of contract for not providing her with the support she needed to make the poker book. Mr. Burnham said he no longer wanted to buy Lightning Rods. Ms. DeWitt walked away with $200,000, her advance for Lightning Rods, which had already been accepted; there was still no published book.

The deal had fallen through and Ms. DeWitt, who was at this time staying on Staten Island, reminded Ms. Chatillon that the stipulations of her contract existed to protect her sanity. Then she once again attempted suicide. “I did not know how to write the books I wanted to write,” she said. She had read that if you took a sedative and tied a plastic bag around your head, you would go to sleep and not wake up. At 4:30 in the morning on May 25, 2004, Ms. DeWitt wrote an email to Ms. Chatillon with the subject line “termination”:

“Please call my cellphone. If I don’t answer you can assume that I am dead; in that case, please call my landlord, Silver Sullivan, and ask him to check my apartment. I have left my mother’s name and phone number by the bed.

It would be helpful if you could also tell Sheila Kohler that I will not be able to come to dinner on Wednesday.”

She wrote to Ms. Chatillon because she thought Ms. Chatillon would be indifferent to the email’s content. Writing to her about the proper disposal of her body was, to Ms. DeWitt’s mind, the same as saying, “I’m going out of town and I left a sirloin steak in the cupboard and it will start to smell.” Committing suicide sounds demented, but almost invariably seems practical to the person wanting to do it. As it turned out, the sedative and bag approach was ineffective. About an hour later she sent a second message:

“This method does not work as well as I’d been told, so I will try something simpler elsewhere. There is no need to call my landlord as the body will not be in the apartment. I will also contact Ms. Kohler.”

Once again, her body got onto a train and she disappeared. Her lawyer contacted her family and friends. As she headed north, she received multiple phone calls, which she didn’t answer. News of her disappearance leaked to the press. The Niagara Falls police department found her a few days later. The New York Times, which in a short article described a “suicidal email message to friends,” printed a comment from Lieutenant Joe Morrison of the Niagara Falls police: “She had a history here,” he said.

Ms. DeWitt had met the literary agent Bill Clegg in 1998, when The Last Samurai was still in the hands of Rebecca Wilson at Weidenfeld. At that time, she was hoping Mr. Clegg could find her a new editor. In 2009, she was reintroduced to Mr. Clegg through the young novelist Ida Hattemer-Higgins. Ms. DeWitt was living in Berlin and working on different writing projects. A short novel, Your Name Here, written in collaboration with the journalist Ilya Gridneff, was excerpted in the literary journal n+1 in 2008. That book never found a publisher, but could be purchased through Ms. DeWitt’s web site. Jenny Turner wrote a nearly 5,000-word review of Your Name Here in the London Review of Books. She said the self-published novel was “like catching a flicker of the future” and praised The Last Samurai as something like “what Joyce and Pound would do with the Internet.” Meanwhile, Ms. DeWitt was becoming widely read as a blogger, cataloguing the grim details of her experience in publishing.

She contacted the defunct Miramax books in 2008 and had it revert the rights to Lightning Rods. Mr. Clegg, now back in the picture, thought he could sell the book in a week to Mitzi Angel at Faber US, but Ms. Angel didn’t think the book was right for her company. Over the course of two months, he sent the novel out to 16 more editors, a checklist of some of the most prominent people in publishing: Hannah Griffiths at Faber UK; Jill Bialosky at Norton; Reagan Arthur at Little, Brown; David Ebershoff at Random House; Andrea Shulz at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Molly Stern at Viking; Lauren Wein at Grove/Atlantic; Gerry Howard at Doubleday; Ethan Nosowsky at Graywolf; James Gurbutt at Constable UK; Nan Graham at Scribner; Dan Frank at Knopf; Anton Mueller at Bloomsbury; Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury; Dan Halpern at Ecco; Sean McDonald at Riverhead. They all turned it down. Most of them liked it; they just couldn’t get over the premise.

Mr. Clegg wanted to resign, but he met once more with Ms. DeWitt, who had flown to New York to show him projects she was working on. She showed him plans for what she calls an “insanely ambitious” novel, the one everyone had wanted from her since Last Samurai. Mr. Clegg was thrilled, but said he wanted to see 100 pages in two months. Ms. DeWitt went to the D.C. suburbs to be with her mother, who required live-in care for about three months after colostomy surgery. Once the surgery was reversed, Ms. DeWitt spent most of her time sitting in intensive care. She did not manage to write 100 pages worthy of submission.

She could not see a way forward. “Fourteen years of publishing crap, no end in sight,” she said. She knew of a 600-foot cliff in Eastbourne. Back in England, she booked a one-way train ticket to Gatwick, an hour from the cliff by train, then checked into a hotel. On Feb. 10, 2010, she sent an email to Mr. Clegg that said, “I’m leaving tomorrow, sorting out a few last-minute things.” She continued:

“… The system strangles the books in the head; it’s not possible to live that way because not living will make someone desperately unhappy.  It goes on too long.   If I had died in 2000 it would have been very simple and clean; the things one does to try to make things work only make it all go on longer.”

Forty minutes later, Mr. Clegg responded:

“None of this—and whatever else is telling you that dying would be better than living—is true, none of it.  As sharply as it may feel so, it is not.   I know, because I reached that black place exactly five years ago.  I failed, somehow, and thank god.  It is snowing today in New York—the fattest flakes against a copper roof out my window.  My brother who is in rehab just called and needed an encouraging voice.  I had lunch with a friend who is having a professional success after years of crushing disappointment.  And you just emailed.  None of these moments would I be here for if I’d left the world when I planned to.”

Ms. DeWitt never made it to the cliff. She sat in her hotel room, smoked, looked at the wall and continued living. It was not long after that when she met with Jeffrey Yang of New Directions. He asked her if he could see Lightning Rods and she said yes.

When Joe’s Lightning Rods business really begins to catch on, he gets a visit from an FBI agent. He thinks to himself: “Holy shit.” The FBI agent, instead of arresting Joe on the spot and shutting down his business, tells him that the public sector is the place where a service like having sex through a hole in the wall is really necessary. People who serve in the public sector, the agent says, “you don’t know when, or how, they’re going to blow.” The bureau would provide a range of locations for Joe to operate his business. They would give him the opportunity to serve his country “and make a profit at the same time.” Joe says, “There comes a time when you have to recognize that you can’t always do things exactly according to plan.”

mmiller@observer.com

Ms. Wilmers, sipping Campari at a book party in her honor at Pravda, asked The Observer what we thought of political situation in the Middle East, and after a few carefully chosen words, we reminded her that we were not employed by an international publication. She winced. "America thinks about its interests far too much. I was here when this all began, in Egypt, and the news said: 'Area relevant to U.S. interests in crisis.' I don't worry about the interests of the U.S." She winced again--or perhaps it was an impish grin. "Or of Netanyahu."

Politics were on the minds of many attendees, including Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, who was obsessing over Wisconsin--"It's not just about pay and perks for workers-it's about 30 years of right-wing assault!"--while preparing for a Saturday flight to Moscow, for the release of her husband's new book. She'll be attending Mikhail Gorbachev's 80th birthday party while she's there. What will she give him? "I haven't thought about that. He has an extraordinarily beautiful family, and that's such a gift."

The Observer also spoke to Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, who was troubled by the Wisconsin protests as well. "I'm going to send [the protesters] a pizza tomorrow! I found out about this today and I thought they had enough pizza at that point." What else was on Ms. Pollitt's mind? The dearth of female bylines. "The LRB could do better," she advised The Observer, making sure to add, "Don't make me sound stupid." We'd call her lively, even luminescent, we advised Ms. Pollitt, effusively. "'Opalescent' is a good word," she said.

On the contrary, cries critic Eliot Weinberger, in The London Review of Books. His essay about Decision Points, entitled "'Damn right,' I said," argues convincingly that this is a text that Michel Foucault would have gone gaga for. Weinbeger avoids condescending to W. and scoffing at his dubious status as a "novelist" -- apart from a few swipes at his Yale frat-boy persona -- and instead constructs a thorough examination of the book's postmodern qualities.

Weisberger says Bush includes such devices as pastisch, absence of protagonist, interweaving of fact and fiction, removal of the "author" from the actual writing process -- all standard criteria for inclusion in the postmodern canon.

But the most intriguing part of the review comes when Weisberger reveals his choice of a touchstone to explain the bone-dry prose the Bush uses in the memoir. 

"There are nearly 500 pages of this, reminiscent of the current po-mo poster boys, Tao Lin, with his anaesthetised declarative sentences," the critic writes.

Tao Lin and George W. Bush, together in the canon at last! Such a statement could be disconcerting for writers -- especially ones who have written flash fiction about President Bush getting stabbed to death -- but naturally Tao has taken the reference in stride, posting a link to the site on his Twitter and his Tumblr.

Your move, W. We'd love to hear your take on Richard Yates.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Click ahead for Tao Lin: The Slideshow>>

Justin Wolfe gave up on the London Review of Books this weekend. The experimental blogger, known to his New York fans as Firmuhment, had been subscribed to the feed for about six months, starting when he saw one of their articles linked to on The Awl. By subscribing to the feed, using a piece of free software called an RSS reader, the 24-year-old Mr. Wolfe was making sure that articles from the LRB would appear before him on a regular basis while a little counter kept track how many new bits of content had been delivered to him.

It was, for Mr. Wolfe, an aspirational subscription: He wanted to be reading the LRB, and he was going to try to make it a habit. It didn't work. Before long, the "unread count" next to the LRB feed started climbing—first, five new items to read. Then seven, then 13, 29, 37 ...

Every once in a while Mr. Wolfe would notice it and wince. "It would just kind of creep up on me at intervals, usually when I had cleared other things out, and so the fact that I hadn't cleared it was more apparent," he said. "Maybe I did read it a handful of times, but then as it piled up, it became more and more of a chore."

Sometimes the unread count would overwhelm Mr. Wolfe, moving him to hit the "mark all as read" button that disappears all the new content one has missed and restores the feed to a pristine state.

On Sunday morning, Mr. Wolfe finally unsubscribed from the LRB feed. Just like that, no more LRB.

Mr. Wolfe is not the only one going through such convulsions. Legions of jittery, media-conscious New Yorkers are eating themselves alive signing up for feeds they never end up reading  in hopes of becoming better people—more knowledgeable, more fun to talk to, more in control of their Internet consumption. They subscribe to dozens, sometimes hundreds of news sources, each of them added to the list with the best of intentions, motivated by the knowledge that, if they really wanted to—that is, if they had it in them to be disciplined and vigilantly curious—they could know everything there is to know. And so these poor balls of anxiety walk around with a constant awareness of all the hundreds of unread news stories, essays, reviews, and blog posts waiting for them on computers—all the marvels they're missing on Boing Boing and Kottke, all the Marginal Revolution posts, all the oil spill updates from The New York Times' U.S. news feed.

Call it Reader's Despair Syndrome, a condition that is afflicting New York's young and old with equal viciousness, but which tends to produce the most dramatic symptoms in people in their 20s and 30s, who retain hope that they will one day become more productive and virtuous in their Internet reading habits.

"It makes me very sad, obviously, when I face the fact that there are like 115 items and I know that I'll never read them," wailed a 25-year-old hedge fund analyst at a rooftop party over the weekend. "And it's like, why can't I be a good enough person to know things about anything? Why am I so pathetic that I can't even read, like, 100 words a day? And then I have to hit the 'pretend everything is read' button, which is basically like hitting the 'lie to yourself' button. It's embarrassing. I hate myself when I do it. It's like the biggest possible failure you could have in your entire life, basically."

While "information overload" is nothing new, actively trying to take control of one's online reading habits  and being able to sustain a consistently rewarding pattern of media consumption has come to be seen as an essential aspect of functional, healthy adulthood. It is simply part of growing up: a hard-won achievement in the same category as cooking for yourself, paying your bills on time, brewing your own coffee instead of buying it every morning, not smoking,  going to the gym and waking up early on weekends.

"A sign of maturity is knowing what you don't know," said Maura Johnston, a 35-year-old professional blogger. "Wanting to know more all the time is a sign that you're still intellectually curious."

Ms. Johnston has been living with Reader's Despair Syndrome since she became the founding editor of Gawker's music blog, Idolator, in 2006.

"I feel like I'm living in a what-am-I-doing-wrong agitation," said Ms. Johnston, who in a fit of emotion deleted all the hundreds of subscriptions in her RSS reader after she left Idolator last fall and has lately been building it back up. "I'm always thinking that—what am I missing? It's a big Internet out there."

Getting to a place where you feel content with the amount and quality of online reading you're doing—shaking that agitation but not becoming complacent—is the true meaning of growing up in New York now.

Twenty-four-year-old filmmaker Lena Dunham knows a thing or two about growing up. Over the weekend, the recent Oberlin grad premiered her debut feature film, Tiny Furniture, about coming of age in recession-era New York. At a drizzly outdoor screening of the movie at BAM on Sunday night, Ms. Dunham said she has come a long way since college, when she managed her online reading haphazardly, using nothing but bookmarks.

"I was feeling literally overwhelmed every day by the number of Web sites I felt compelled to go to," she told The Observer. "You know how when you go to a library and you're like, there are so many books I will never read, and the world just feels like too much? I felt like that every time I opened my computer." Getting an RSS account with Google—thereby resolving to learn to be economical with her "brainspace"—was a rite of passage for Ms. Dunham, an avid Internet user who first got noticed for her Web videos.

"I feel like we're the first generation of people who spent all of our high-school time on the Internet," she said. "Back then, it didn't seem like there should be any boundaries to it, and now it does."

Registering for an RSS reader is perhaps the most common coping strategy employed by those suffering from Reader's Despair. Though Google Reader is the most popular one, there are lots of competing tools for RSS, such as Netvibes, Bloglines and NetNewsWire. Do a good job with one of those services, and you're living in the black, keeping up with everything you want to be keeping up with and not missing a thing. Starting an account is usually accompanied with a feeling of euphoric optimism, as the long-suffering RDSer anticipates the onset of order and control—peace at last from the constant hurt of failing to take full advantage of the Internet. As a life choice, it represents an aggressive step toward organizing one's online reading—a wisely built and properly maintained set of RSS feeds epitomizes discipline and rigor—but often it just ends in more misery.

The adjustment to an RSS lifestyle rarely goes smoothly.

"Some people don't have the self-awareness or self-control to use RSS responsibly," said Marco Arment, the lead developer of Tumblr. "I think it's important that people recognize that this is a form of addiction."

A lot can go wrong, mostly due to the soul-crushing, nagging aspects of feed overload, which are aggravated by RSS readers that prominently display unread counts. Brian Shih, the product manager for Google Reader, suggested that the company knows all about the malaise its reader can cause, and the side effects of RDS that it can provoke.

"People don't like seeing the unread counts go up," Mr. Shih said. "We realized this a while ago, and we actually do offer the option to turn them off." The option is much appreciated, certainly, but the fact is that people suffering from RDS are constitutionally incapable of turning it off.

One common crisis moment comes when a user at wit's end does on a grand scale what Mr. Wolfe did to the London Review of Books, and marks as read every single item he or she has been neglecting in every single feed.

"It's almost like your house gets so dirty that you just set it on fire, and go buy a new house or something," said 26-year-old Edith Zimmerman, who skims thousands of items daily in her Google Reader as part of her job as a New York culture blogger. "It's sort of like, 'I can't deal with this, but I also can't have it be at 400 and something.'"

"It makes me feel pretty awful—there's a whole mess of emotions behind it, and they're all caused by this concept of read versus unread," said Matt Langer, the 30-year-old has been building an RSS reader he hopes will spare users the private anguish he thinks other software, Google's especially, inadvertently encourage. "It gets this Protestant work ethic thing attached to it—you have to complete these 578 unread items in order to be done."

Along with other features, Mr. Langer said, the unread count "creates this mind-set that you're not done doing something until every single thing has been consumed." The system he is building, he said, which has been in development for two years, "has no concept of it at all."

Think of Mr. Langer as a doctor developing a new drug to combat Reader's Despair Syndrome—an RSS  tool that won't make its users feel bad all the time, and will facilitate reading vast amounts instead of suffocating their ambitions.

Other doctors are at work building tools to help RDSers suppress their worst natural inclinations, and prevail over their busy schedules, laziness and tendency to never read anything longer than a 200-word blog post.

Mr. Arment, the Tumblr developer, created the popular iPhone app Instapaper to help fellow RDSers read long pieces that they never have time for when they're using the Web at work. Instapaper lets them send any article they come across—whether it's from The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books or even the LRB!—to their phone, and to retrieve it later while they're on the subway or in line at the store. "It's a tool for people who have this kind of information addiction and unread count compulsion," Mr. Arment said. "It's made for us, basically."

Using Instapaper is understood to be a virtue by those suffering from Reader's Despair Syndrome—an indication of seriousness and a high standard of living. Some see it as an antidote to the serial skimming that inevitably occurs when one grows accustomed to an RSS reader. It is seen as a cure, an aid designed to protect its users from themselves.

The founders of Longform.org, an aggregator of long-form journalism that works in conjunction with Instapaper, compare the RSS experience with walking into a supermarket and having food thrown at you. "You're getting cinnamon buns thrown at you all day, and you go, 'Yeah, I'll keep eating these, whatever,'" said Max Linsky, sitting in the Fort Greene café Smooch on a recent Friday afternoon.

Newsweek blogger and Instapaper devotee Mark Coatney took the food analogy one step further, underscoring that using Instapaper is seen as a reflection of a healthy lifestyle. 

"It feels like you're eating organic," he said. "You're having a nice substantial meal as opposed to the fast-food RSS thing."

Some young New Yorkers have succeeded at mastering both domains. They are the envy of all their friends, and often find themselves being asked for reading strategy advice.

Brendan Curry, an editor at W.W. Norton, has a baroque system in place that has taken him some years to achieve. He goes through the feeds in his reader every morning, skimming blogs and tabbing open links that appeal to him as he goes one-by-one through high-minded aggregators like Longform and Bookforum's Omnivore. Once he's done opening everything, he goes through and tags the stuff he's really interested in using a service called Delicious; at the end of the week, an intern from Norton compiles everything tagged "to+read" in one file and sends it to Mr. Curry's Sony Reader so he can read it over the weekend.

People like Mr. Curry are living the good life. They are thriving online. They don't just stay on top of current events and pop culture ephemera, they read scholarly blogs and—weird but true—actual books, too. They've read Thomas Ricks's Fiasco, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side and even that long book about Sonic Youth. Last week, Mr. Curry was reading a 42,000-word article from Wired published in 1996, about the laying of an underwater fiber-optic cable.

Mr. Curry, who used to suffer from RDS, is proof that change is possible. But be warned: Most people should not dream of achieving his high level—statistically, it just does not happen that often. Most recovered RDSers finally cope by merely unclenching, and by giving up their completist inclinations along with their impulses toward rigor and cultivation. So what if there are 14 New Yorker articles you haven't read? Who can keep up, really? Many people who have arrived at that stance justify the adjustments they have made to their standards by portraying it to themselves as the pragmatic option—the only thing that will keep them sane. 

"For a long time, I would acknowledge, you know, 'I didn't do well this week,' and say, "I'm gonna do better next time.' Now I don't even bother," said Mr. Coatney. "I had that compulsion of looking at everything, to make sure everything was not bold. I've kind of given up."

As for Mr. Wolfe, he recently re-subscribed to the London Review of Books feed—the proximate cause was a desire to check how many others were signed up—and then found that he couldn't make himself get rid of it again. 

"I still haven't read any posts," Mr. Wolfe said. "They're talking about the World Cup, and I have even less interest in that than their usual offerings."

lneyfakh@observer.com

With additional reporting credit to Amanda Cormier.

The Journal's cheekily named new section -- "Greater New York," that's some kind of pun, no? -- arrived on Monday, followed on Tuesday by a hotly-anticipated Senate appearance for Lloyd Blankfein, Fabulous Fab, and the rest of the Goldman gang. Both were, to be honest, a bit of a letdown.

And by Thursday, things were getting grim. Toxic crude oil was spreading in the Gulf, and--worse!--the cult of Apple was starting to crumble.

As we do every Friday, we've tried to put all this in perspective, with a look back at the key learnings from the past several days on The Daily Transom.

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A quick poll revealed that none of the panelists had Facebook or used Twitter. In spite of this, though, they had had vivid experiences of online life.

Mr. Toibin was eating chicken salad when Edmund White told him about chat rooms. The internet, he found, meant "the end of gay loneliness."

From here Mr. Toibin segued into an extended riff on gender, age, and reading habits. This included www.silverdaddies.com (another Edmund White recommendation), the fact that "women still read novels in America," and the enduring mystery of what heterosexual men think about--given that "if there's a straight man over the age of 40 on a plane reading a novel, he wrote it."

Mr. Spice cut Mr. Toibin off, although his audience and fellow panelists appeared entertained.

"It's absurd this man doesn't have a blog," said Mr. Wood. "He's already done three entries."

As for the critic himself, he said that he has experienced "enormous enjoyment, really quite life changing, though Youtube": the site allowed him to rediscover his teenage love of drums.

Mr. Lanchester suggested that dubious listeners search "james wood bongos." (The Transom found swifter success with "james wood finger drums.")

How does blog writing differ from regular writing, Mr. Spice asked the panelists?

"The only blog I read is our blog," said Ms. Wilmers, an editor at the LRB.

Most were loathe to speculate as to cause and effect, citing examples of "bloggy" style that long predated blogs. Mr. Wood mentioned David Foster Wallace's allowing sentences "to get ugly and scuffed"; Mr. Toibin said he imagined Jonathan Swift as a blogger.

Ulrimately, Mr. Toibin said that he wasn't sure where the internet ranked in the grand scheme of technological innovations. When he prays, he said, it's for God to improve the quality of his solitude, and when he applies this standard (does it improve solitude?) to technological advances, he comes out in favor of electricity: it allows for reading at night.

"The car has been good too," he said.

"Anesthesia," added Mr. Lanchester.

After the panel, Mr. Spice seemed jazzed, although he admitted to the Transom that "the weakness of the thing" was having to choose between LRB types and internet types--they had gone with LRB types. And while they had tried to get some young ones, schedules had not permitted.

"We're all rather old," he said.