[...] In Sabrina, he wrote an advice column caled "Ask Bill," in which readers were invited to bring their questions to Professor Kennick. Bertrand Russell wrote in to reveal his crush on Alfred North Whitehead and ask what he should do. "Any relationship that depends for its security on the proposition that monistic atomism has any relevance to post-Enlightenment conceptions of phenomenological reality is not worth saving," the Sabrina Kennick sternly replied. Most stories were collaborations, but Wallace revived his childhood love of Hardy Boys mysteries to write "The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hung Hamster" himself:

Suddenly a sinister, twin-engined airplane came into view, sputtering and back-firing. It lost power and began spinning in toward the hill. It was heading right for the Sabrina brothers!
Luckily at the last minute the plane ceased to exist.
"Crikey!" exclaimed Joe. "It's a good thing we're characters in a highly implausible children's book or we'd be goners!"

His anguish, he wrote, had multiple sources, from a fear of fame to a fear of failure. Behind the ordinary fears lurked the fear of being ordinary.

"Sad" became the tocsin ringing through the piece, sadness as the consequence of too much plenty: sad waiters, sad cruise ship-goers taking pointless videos of other sad people pointing video cameras at them from their own cruise ships, and sad, senseless attempts by Americans to amuse themselves in the absence of any larger spiritual idea. "Choose with care," Marathe warns in Infinite Jest. "You are what you love. No?" Walace's cruise ship piece was about the price of failing to choose well.

[...] his expectation he could have things both ways, pursuing the questionable tactic of writing cleverly to assert the superiority of sincerity in a world wedded to cleverness. Scott also accused Wallace of fencing off all possible objections to his work by making sure every possible criticism was already embedded in the text. Brief Interviews, especially, the critic wrote, was not so much anti-ironic as "meta-ironic," driven much like the characters in its stories by the fear of being known. This sort of writing, he continued, was clearly connected to the self-centered self-absorbed culture of late twentieth-century America, but "does Wallace's work represent an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid and exotic symptoms? Of course, there can only be one answer: it's both." Wallace was not pleased but he was impressed. In the margins of a draft of the story "Good Old Neon," which he began around this time, he noted (punningly), "AO Scott saw into my character."

[...] It was their Catcher in the Rye, a Catcher in the Rye for people who had read The Catcher in the Rye in school. [...]

In August, Stirling suffered an athletic injury, and Green wanted to be with him, so Wallace's parents stayed with Wallace for ten days. He was close to giving up hope.