Las Vegas, Nevada
July 28, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Alivia Zivich, a programmer at an internet publishing company in Los Angeles. Her letter is the last in our weeklong series of letters about life at work, which concludes tomorrow with another Open Letters conversation.

Sharp-eyed readers of Open Letters might remember Alivia as the reader who wrote me an email a couple of weeks ago explaining that she preferred voyeuristic open letters to those that felt more like essays in letter form. I quoted her email in my editor’s letter the next day, and used it as an occasion to write about the ongoing debate between readers who think of Open Letters as being about first-person writing of all types, and those who think about this as a magazine ofletters, and letters alone.

After I quoted her letter, she and I began an email correspondence, which developed into today’s letter, about a contretemps at her office.

In other Open Letters news: NOW Magazine, in Toronto, published an article on Open Letters yesterday. The reporter, Matt Galloway, emphasized the medium, as much as the message; he wrote that the heart of Open Letters is “a page called The Delivery,” which is our mini-manifesto about the future of content-delivery on the Internet, and a pitch for our free weekly PDF subscription. Speaking of which: please consider.

Tomorrow, another Open Letters conversation, this one conducted by Deirdre Dolan, who interviewed Sarah Jones about being the most popular girl in sixth grade, back in the first week of our existence. Deirdre’s new interview, the conclusion to our Work week, is with Invisibyl Ninja, a nineteen-year-old tech-support guy at Earthlink, who explains how nerds spend their free time, what he’s supposed to do when customers curse at him, and what being in love is all about.

Please come on back.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough