Send me your letters

Attention editors, publishers, bloggers and anyone else who gets email from a public unhinged on a semi-regular basis.

The next time you get a letter from a reader on the far side of coherence and civility, avoid the temptation that Keith Olbermann succumbed to (e.g., responding in kind). Instead, send 'em here: in@civilities.net.

Here's a model letter-- actually a voicemail message-- that Nick Lemann referenced in his Fear and Favor article in the New Yorker issue of February 7th & 14th 2005, explaining the experience of Chicago Tribune Editor-In-Chief Ann Marie Lipinski:

A few days before my visit, the Tribune’s Sunday magazine had published a memoir by a woman who had been unable to get health insurance because she suffers from depression. Lipinski walked across her office to her desk and played back a voice-mail message she had received in response to the story. A woman’s voice said, “I’m really quite disgusted with the article on the uninsured. I think it’s very socialistic. Health care is not a right in this country. We are not Sweden and we are not Canada. I do not like these heart-tugging stories about people who don’t have health care. . . . Are you a socialist? . . . I do not appreciate these insipid little stories that say, ‘Oh, this poor person who doesn’t have health care.’ . . . I know friends and family who are really upset with the leftist tendencies of your coverage.” At this point, the voice-mail system timed out; it sounded as if the woman would gladly have kept going. “I get surprised,” Lipinski said. “Even something like this is seen through a political lens, rather than as, Here’s somebody with a different experience from me.”

Send me your best. Or rather, your worst.