A couple weeks back, I was in a bad way. I’d recently joined Twitter, was always on Facebook, and checked my email (and I don’t exaggerate) about 75 times a day. I couldn’t stand it, but I also couldn’t stop. I spent more than half my waking hours on a screen.

It’s not heroin. I should have been able to stop myself. But I couldn’t. Really. I wasn’t getting any writing done. I was ignoring my girlfriend and my friends. I was reading George Packer’s musings on how all this technology needs to stop and tearing up. I read this article about heavy web users being depressed. I agreed. I checked my email again.

And then, I found this essay at The Millions about a student who had to go to a corner of the Coop in Harvard Square where the wireless didn’t work  to get writing done, and, after chuckling at the irony, I decided to do what he did.  I had heard about a coffeeshop called Borderlands Cafe, affiliated with Borderlands Bookstore, that had opened just a couple months ago here in San Francisco.

Not only do they not have wireless, but they don’t have music, and everything is remarkably well lit.  …more

The protagonist of this novel about addiction, therapy, and recovery, confronts many of the same issues as its author.

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Kaye Gibbons, author of the 1987 debut best-seller Ellen Foster and several subsequent novels, is the subject of an Associated Press profile published in several newspapers and Sunday book sections over the weekend. The article traces her downfall from “vivacious” best-selling author to her 2008 arrest for forging hydrocodone prescriptions to her disappearance into mental illness. …more

by Rose Garrett

I recently read that revenge, in addition to sex and food, stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain, which explains why the settling of scores is often pursued with as much unbounded enthusiasm as philandering and doughnut holes. To that short list I would add book-reading, which might appear more high-minded than the rest, but which has revealed itself to me to be as base, vulgar, and fucking incredible as any of the seven sins. …more