Last fall, Salon switched its letters-to-the-editor format from an old-media mode — email us a letter, and maybe we’ll publish it — to a more Web-native model, in which readers post their letters by themselves, and then Salon provides a filter after-the-fact for those readers who still want us to don our editors’ hats.
We’re mostly very happy with the result. Occasionally, of course, there are flamefests, and people go crazy complaining about an article or writer they don’t like or, more often, another letter writer they detest. But more often there are knowledgeable, creative responses to the articles we publish. And sometimes they push a discussion forward in ways we could never have expected. (Some of the letters in response to our Abu Ghraib Files feature, including some from people in uniform, were unforgettable.)
Still, we continue to get a smaller volume of letters to the old e-mail inbox that we still maintain for not-for-publication communications. It is here, inevitably, that certain categories of perennial correspondence continue to pour in.
Over the weekend, we got two in succession: First, there was the borderline-literate note from a reader who had just stumbled upon our 1999 feature on Brazilian bikini waxing — and wanted to know where she could get one. Sorry, can’t help. (I suppose the Salon name doesn’t help these readers disambiguate.)
Then there was the letter-writer who just couldn’t tell Salon apart from that other politics-and-culture Web magazine whose five-letter-name begins with S. When the e-mail begins, “Dear Mr. Weisberg,” we know what we’re dealing with.
Scanning such missives, I find my years at Salon collapsing into a durationless Now, a frozen moment of e-mail eternity.
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