when you multitask, everything gets done a little worse.

Let me just speak of my own experience as a writer. I work on a networked computer, and I have it on a word-processing program, and I'm writing and I'm thinking, and I have my interviews all around. And I'm trying to make a hard point, and it's hard, and I hit my e-mail, and I do a little e-mail. You know, 20 minutes passes; a half hour passes; 10 minutes passes. And I've lost my thought. And I go back to the writing. And once again, when it's hard, I hit Safari and I'm Googling somebody; I'm checking if my books are selling on Amazon.

I'm doing every little thing to break up the difficult. And in my interviewing I find that I am not alone, that the pull to do a lot of things when something is hard is a kind of universal seduction. And it does not make for better writing.

how to make a sustained, complicated argument on a hard, cultural, historical, psychological point.