Free Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace

This:
Evidently I’m supposed to say something about what the following document is and where it came from.
From what I understand, in autumn 1999 the powers that be at Rolling Stone magazine decided they wanted to get four writers who were not political journalists to do articles on the four big presidential candidates and their day-to-day campaigns in the early primaries. My own résumé happens to have “NOT A POLITICAL JOURNALIST” right there at the very top, and Rolling Stone magazine called, and pitched the idea, and furthermore said I could pick whichever candidate I wanted (which of course was flattering, although in retrospect they probably told the other three writers the same thing—magazines are always very flattering and carte blanche ish when they’re trying to get you to do something). The only candidate I could see trying to write about was Senator John McCain (R-AZ), whom I’d seen a recent tape of on Charlie Rose and had decided was either incredibly honest and forthright or else just insane. There were other reasons for wanting to write about McCain and party politics, too, all of which are explored in considerable detail in the document itself and so I don’t see any reason to inflict them on you here.
The Electronic Editor (actual title, like on his office letterhead and everything) says I should insert here that I, the author, am not a Republican, and that actually I ended up voting for Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ) in the Illinois primary. I don’t personally see how my own politics are anybody’s business, but I’m guessing the point of the insertion is to make clear that there are no partisan motives or conservative agenda behind the article even though parts of it (i.e., of the upcoming article) might appear to be pro-McCain. It’s not, though neither is it anti-; it’s just meant to be the truth as one person saw it.
What else to tell you. At first I was supposed to follow McCain around in New Hampshire as he campaigned for 1 February’s big primary there. Then, around Christmastime, Rolling Stone decided that they wanted to abort the assignment because Governor Bush was way ahead in the polls and outspending McCain ten to one and they thought McCain was going to get flattened in New Hampshire and that his campaign would be over by the time anything could come out in Rolling Stone and that they’d look stupid. Then on 1 February, when the early NH returns had McCain ahead, the magazine suddenly turned around and called again and said the article was a Go again but that now they wanted me to fly out to NH and start that very night, which (because I happen to have dogs with professionally diagnosed emotional problems who require special care, and it always takes me several days to recruit, interview, select, instruct, and field-test a dogsitter) was out of the question. Some of this is probably not too germane, but the point is that I ended up flying out the following week and riding with the McCain2000 traveling press corps from 7 to 13 February, which in retrospect was probably the most interesting and complicated week of the whole 2000 GOP race.
Especially the complicated part. For it turned out that the more interesting a campaign-related person or occurrence or intrigue or strategy or happenstance was, the more time and page-space it took to make sense of it, or, if it made no sense, to describe what it was and explain why it didn’t make sense but was interesting anyway if viewed in a certain context that then itself had to be described, and so on. With the end result being that the actual document delivered per contract to Rolling Stone magazine turned out to be longer and more complicated than they’d asked for. Quite a bit longer, actually. In fact the article’s editor pointed out that running the whole thing would take up most of Rolling Stone’ s text-space and might even cut into the percentage of the magazine reserved for advertisements, which obviously would not do. * And