New York City
December 18, 2000

Dear Readers,

First of all, how about that Abby Bridge? I thought her week of Open Letters/Other People’s Mail was tremendous, and it was certainly well-received: Michael Welch might have put it most succinctly when he wrote on Monday to say,

that tiger woods letter is tight. very tight. intense shit. i’m glad you’re doing this thing this week; experimentation is good. collaboration. right on.

I liked everything that Abby selected, but I’d like to heap special praise on James Nestor’s true confession of being a customer-service fifth columnist, which makes me laugh every time I read it. It was tucked away in Abby’s editor’s letterfrom Wednesday, so you might have missed it. If you haven’t read it, please do.

The week prior to Other People’s Mail week, we published letters about sickness and health, including three dispatches from Aliza Pollack about her current life, with cancer. The final exchange in that trio, between me and Aliza, prompted this suggestion from Jodi Kantor, who is an editor at Slate:

I’m pretty down about Aliza’s relapse. And now I’m feeling an inverted sense of the guilt that she described today about publishing her chemo stories just as she was getting better. Here I’d been celebrating her remission just as she was facing a stem cell transplant! Anyway, when you send encouragement and compliments and luck to her, please add some from me.

Her letter also reminded me that I’ve long wanted to register myself as a stem cell donor. You might find it too cheesy to link her letter to the National Marrow Donation Program’s website – sort of has that “what YOU can do!” ring – but just so you know, the url iswww.marrow.org, and from what I know, they really do need donors.

Jodi’s idea is of course not cheesy in the least.

Today’s letter comes from Angelica Biddle, a young woman in Los Angeles. It’s a love letter, of sorts, to her boyfriend that she cc’d to Open Letters, which was nice of her.

We’re moving to a holiday schedule over the next two weeks, and we’ll be publishing more infrequently than usual: probably five or six letters between now and the end of the year. Tomorrow, Paul Maliszewski concludes his quartet of moving letters (the last one appeared in November) with an epic account of his legal battle with his landlord. It is not to be missed.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough