June 26, 2000
Los Angeles, California

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Samantha Shapiro, a young American living in Jerusalem. It is the first of two parts. In the second half, to be posted tomorrow, the missing laptop turns up.

I’ve never met Samantha, never even spoken to her on the phone. Her editor at Open Letters is the person to whom her letter is addressed: Emily White, a Seattle writer who spent five years in the mid-to-late nineties editing a weekly newspaper there called The Stranger. I was lucky enough to receive the Stranger during most of those years, even though I was living far from Seattle, and I was able to watch from a distance as Emily did strange and beautiful things with the newspaper.

In her last issue, for instance, her staff profiled the 37 Least Powerful People in Seattle, creating one of the funniest and saddest pieces of journalism I’ve ever read.

When I called Emily about Open Letters, she had a truckload of ideas and a slew of writers to suggest, many of whom, including Samantha Shapiro, got their start working with Emily at the Stranger, producing the kind of intensely reported and intensely felt journalism that is present in Samantha’s letter.

For those of you who stay away from the Internet on the weekend, two reminders. The first is that on Saturday we published our first-ever Conversation, an interview with Sarah Jones, a sixth-grader, who spoke with Deirdre Dolan about being the most popular girl in her school.

Another first from the weekend: our first weekly PDF issue went out to subscribers on Sunday afternoon. Fourteen pages. Two columns. Nice looking headlines. Illustrations. A photograph of Sarah Jones. Suitable for printing, stapling, and taking with you to bed. Lunch. Anywhere. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do. It’s free. You can read all about how to subscribe here, and all about why to subscribe here.

Tomorrow: part two of Samantha Shapiro’s letter. Please come on back.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough