In the coming years, it may be that conversational, artificially intelligent assistants will become part of the answer, deciding whether or not to alert us to messages, helping us retrieve information and recommending items of interest. But figuring out book reviews, indexes and the rest took several centuries, so we shouldn’t expect an immediate solution. In the meantime we must endure information overload: the feeling that arises in the space of time between a sudden increase in the flow of information and the development of the tools to enable us to cope with it.