More than one friend of mine, and one ex-girlfriend in particular, has been driven to agitation by the way I read things online. That is: I'm a compulsive highlighter. In order to puncture a text, I need to drag my touchpad mouse over to what I'm reading, click deeply and drag a gray bar of pure clarity over each grapheme as it reveals itself to me. Then, and only then, can I make sense of the world.

The New York Times is out to deny me my way of understanding. As you may have noticed, sometime over the last week, nytimes.com has equipped its text with an insidious function to pop open a dictionary window and define a word as a reader highlights it. All of a sudden I embrace, in blinding fury, the arguments against David Foster Wallace's aggressive digressioning.

Kriston Capps, valiantly, is coming to the defense of a tactile mode of reading. His Free Clicking campaign is that most important of crusades: the insistence on the dignities of civilization against the small erosions of vulgarity. Join him.