“Early in June, Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, found himself confronting an extreme version of a problem familiar to many of us — an overflowing e-mail box. Lessig, a polymath whose sharp critiques of copyright law have made him famous online, receives a great deal of mail. On a typical day, between 100 and 200 messages (not counting spam) will crash into his in box, and, incredibly, he manages to keep up with most of it. But over the years, one of Lessig’s mail folders — a box called Reply To, stuffed with messages from strangers he felt deserved some kind of response — had ballooned to intolerable proportions. By June, Reply To contained almost a thousand messages. That’s when Lessig had an epiphany. ‘I realized I wasn’t ever going to be able to reply to it all,’ he says….What Lessig did wasn’t very novel — he gave up. Answering the mail in his Reply To folder was going to take time, and he had better ways to spend it.”