Skim, Freak, Purge | The New York Observer
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?
