Milford, Connecticut
December 4, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter comes from Kevin Patterson, a Canadian doctor and author who is currently practicing medicine in Saipan, an island in the western Pacific, west of Hawaii, north of Australia. Here is a picture of a sunset in Saipan.

Kevin is the author of the uncommonly engrossing meditation on strokes and their treatment that we ran back in August. (It is soon to be reprinted inGeist.) He’s also the author of The Water in Between, a book that combines a travelogue of Kevin’s solo sailing trip across the Pacific with a clear-eyed, unsentimental examination of our need to flee, and then to romanticize that flight. It’s a great read.

Kevin’s letter kicks off a week of open letters about medicine, which will include two or three new installments in our ongoing series of letters from Aliza Pollack, about her cancer treatment. For a little background, and in preparation for tomorrow’s letter, please check out Aliza’s first letter, from August, and her second, from September.

We made an important adjustment to the architecture of the web site over the weekend: from his Brixton flat, fueled by Wispas, Craig Taylor has magically turned our single archive page into two archive pages.

Last week I was chatting in a restaurant in New York with a young Open Letters reader, and the conversation turned, as conversations often do, to our archives. This reader was giving me a piece of her mind, complaining that our archives were impossible to navigate, merely a list of links titled “Week One” and “Week Two,” with no names, no subjects, no dates. What, she asked, were we thinking?

“Well, there’s the alphabetical list, right below those,” I protested. “That has names.”

“What alphabetical list?” she asked.

My blood ran cold. We were doofuses, I realized: as the weeks had piled up, they had pushed the alphabetical list down below the bottom of most people’s browser windows, never to be paged down to.

Doofuses no more, though: Please go check out our new-look archives, bothalphabetical and chronological. Roam around. Take another gander at Noah Cowan’s critique of Im Kwon Taek’s film “Run Far Fly High Kae-Byok!” Revisit Andrew Wilson’s re-visit to the DMV. Relive the majesty that was week ten.

And as always, let us know (ateditor@openletters.net) if you have any suggestions for improvement. We can always bribe Craig with another bottle of Lucozade.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough