BOB GARFIELD:  I am happy to report that there are places where civilian comment is a safe and civil enterprise, the letters to the editor section of a newspaper. If the op-ed section is a soap box for the brash and voluble, the Letters section is a gentle [CLEARS THROAT] proceeding a terse remark. As Polonius said, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” a message lost on many an opinionator but not on Felicia Nimue Ackerman, who is among the most published letter writers on the Eastern Seaboard. A professor of philosophy at Brown, Ackerman is a fixture in the Letters sections of the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. Since 1987, more than 200 of her letters have been printed in the Times alone. Felicia Nimue, welcome to On the Media.

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD:   Two-hundred is a large number but it says nothing of your success rate. How many letters do you write before you get one published, on average?

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Way more. I really want to stress this, a very, very small percentage of my letters get published. This is not a hobby for anyone who cannot tolerate rejection.

BOB GARFIELD:  We’re now living in a digital age where everybody can be published. Now that we are amid this glut of opinionation, is what you do less relevant, more relevant, what?

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Naturally, I would ask relevant to what? What I try to do is give opinions that would be unlikely to be heard elsewhere. There was an article in the New York Times in 2002 about the film Tuck Everlasting, where William Hurt, the star of the film, was quoted as saying, “Most people think of life as a story of life and death, and death is the book end. Take that book end away and what have you got?” And I wrote, “This is typical of attempts to sugarcoat death. Here is an alternative metaphor:  death is a punch of the jaw. Take away that punch and what have you got, an intact jaw.”

In the constant pressure nowadays to accept and sugarcoat death, I think saying that death simply stinks comes up as a mildly unusual idea.

BOB GARFIELD:  If I can discern any trend in what you’ve written over the years, contrarian springs pretty immediately to mind. I want you to read, if you would please, a letter that you wrote in “not praise” [LAUGHS] of the poet Joyce Kilmer, famous for the schoolroom classic, “Trees.”

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Oh, I just said - it was two lines:  “I think that if I had a choice, I’d never read a fool like Joyce.”

BOB GARFIELD:  [LAUGHS] I’ve never read any kind of criticism of Joyce, much less a broadside like that. [LAUGHS]

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  The article that it commented on in the book review – I think it was called “The Tree Grows and Grows” - did quote a number of people who didn't like Joyce, although it also quoted people who praised him. But I think he’s just mawkish and ridiculous.

BOB GARFIELD:  At this stage, I want to actually bring in Tom Feyer, your editor at the New York Times. He edits the Letters section. And I understand this is the first time you’re meeting, so go crazy.

TOM FEYER:  Hi, nice to meet you.

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  And so, and likewise to you, as Sir Thomas Mallory would say.

BOB GARFIELD:  [LAUGHS] Tom, I am curious to know what constitutes a successful letters to the editor writer?

TOM FEYER:  There is a certain formula. You write briefly. You respond to an article. We tend to have a limit of roughly 150 words. You say something smart, to the point. Felicia Nimue certainly knows how to do it.

BOB GARFIELD:  Do you have a particular favorite among her 200 missives?

TOM FEYER:  Well, I’ve been the Letters editor since 1999, so I can’ say that I’ve read all 200. Actually, it’s 226, according to a search in my Nexus database. There was one June 7th, 2013. It was referring to an article, “Too Old to Judge, Albany Considers Raising Age Limits for State’s Courts.” And she wrote, “Rather than treating judges as incompetent once they reach a certain age, New York should rely on nondiscriminatory procedures for removing all incompetent judges from office, regardless of age.” I think that is a somewhat typical letter, in that one of your things is prejudice against old people.

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  I’m 66 now, but I’ve been concerned with that. In fact, I’ve had that all my life.

BOB GARFIELD:  Felicia Nimue, it’s one thing to have a bête noir, as I believe you could describe your feelings about age discrimination in all of its forms, and another to have a hobby horse that you can be depended on to just constantly flog. Have you been cautioned by Tom or anybody else about riding the horse just too hard?

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Not really, and I think that’s partly because I write letters on a lot of other subjects too. For example, I’m very interested in the discrimination and hostility toward fat people - I used to be fat, although I’m not now - the assumption that people who overeat have eating disorders but people who take risks like climbing mountains don’t have mountaineering disorders.

  [LAUGHTER]

I’m very out of sympathy with the therapeutic view of life, which takes unconventionality to be a kind of mental illness. I’m very concerned about privacy in the workplace, the idea that your employer should not be telling you what to eat, what kind of health habits to have, what to do in your free time, and so forth. I’m concerned about self-righteousness, people who criticize other people for using air conditioning, for example. I’m concerned about internet bashing.

One of my most recent letters in the Magazine said, “If you can’t experience the real world by sitting in front of a screen, how can you experience by reading? Books divert our attention from the world around us too, and it’s a good thing. Books and screens let us exercise our uniquely human capacity to transcend our immediate surroundings and enter the world of the imagination.” So I write about quite a lot of things, other than old age.

BOB GARFIELD:  I want to ask you final thing, Felicia Nimue. Most writers who have enduring relationships with editors have relationships with [LAUGHS] those editors, and yet, this is really the first time you and Tom have ever spoken. Now that you have his undivided attention, face to face, more or less, have you anything you’d like to share?

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Basically, that I’m pleased when he runs my letters, and I think they’re intelligently edited, and I’m happy with the whole situation. And I realize this is most uninteresting but, in fact, that’s what my reaction is.

BOB GARFIELD:  Would you like a redirect, Tom?

TOM FEYER:  One suggestion I would make, and you can disregard it, if you like, because you send so many letters, obviously, if you send five letters a day, which you sometimes do, we’re gonna run, at most, one of those letters. So, if you have a particular favorite, let me know, not that that guarantees we’ll pick it, but I won’t have to choose among the five.

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Thank you very much. I will do that in the future.

BOB GARFIELD:  Well, I must say that for OTM’s part, I’m just so happy that we could have made this encounter possible. And I’m getting a little choked up. Felicia Nimue, Tom, thank you so much.

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Thank you.

TOM FEYER:  Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD:   Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a prolific letter writer and professor of philosophy at Brown University. Tom Feyer is the Letters editor for the New York Times.

BOB GARFIELD:  I am happy to report that there are places where civilian comment is a safe and civil enterprise, the letters to the editor section of a newspaper. If the op-ed section is a soap box for the brash and voluble, the Letters section is a gentle [CLEARS THROAT] proceeding a terse remark. As Polonius said, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” a message lost on many an opinionator but not on Felicia Nimue Ackerman, who is among the most published letter writers on the Eastern Seaboard. A professor of philosophy at Brown, Ackerman is a fixture in the Letters sections of the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. Since 1987, more than 200 of her letters have been printed in the Times alone. Felicia Nimue, welcome to On the Media.

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD:   Two-hundred is a large number but it says nothing of your success rate. How many letters do you write before you get one published, on average?

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Way more. I really want to stress this, a very, very small percentage of my letters get published. This is not a hobby for anyone who cannot tolerate rejection.

BOB GARFIELD:  We’re now living in a digital age where everybody can be published. Now that we are amid this glut of opinionation, is what you do less relevant, more relevant, what?

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Naturally, I would ask relevant to what? What I try to do is give opinions that would be unlikely to be heard elsewhere. There was an article in the New York Times in 2002 about the film Tuck Everlasting, where William Hurt, the star of the film, was quoted as saying, “Most people think of life as a story of life and death, and death is the book end. Take that book end away and what have you got?” And I wrote, “This is typical of attempts to sugarcoat death. Here is an alternative metaphor:  death is a punch of the jaw. Take away that punch and what have you got, an intact jaw.”

In the constant pressure nowadays to accept and sugarcoat death, I think saying that death simply stinks comes up as a mildly unusual idea.

BOB GARFIELD:  If I can discern any trend in what you’ve written over the years, contrarian springs pretty immediately to mind. I want you to read, if you would please, a letter that you wrote in “not praise” [LAUGHS] of the poet Joyce Kilmer, famous for the schoolroom classic, “Trees.”

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Oh, I just said - it was two lines:  “I think that if I had a choice, I’d never read a fool like Joyce.”

BOB GARFIELD:  [LAUGHS] I’ve never read any kind of criticism of Joyce, much less a broadside like that. [LAUGHS]

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  The article that it commented on in the book review – I think it was called “The Tree Grows and Grows” - did quote a number of people who didn't like Joyce, although it also quoted people who praised him. But I think he’s just mawkish and ridiculous.

BOB GARFIELD:  At this stage, I want to actually bring in Tom Feyer, your editor at the New York Times. He edits the Letters section. And I understand this is the first time you’re meeting, so go crazy.

TOM FEYER:  Hi, nice to meet you.

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  And so, and likewise to you, as Sir Thomas Mallory would say.

BOB GARFIELD:  [LAUGHS] Tom, I am curious to know what constitutes a successful letters to the editor writer?

TOM FEYER:  There is a certain formula. You write briefly. You respond to an article. We tend to have a limit of roughly 150 words. You say something smart, to the point. Felicia Nimue certainly knows how to do it.

BOB GARFIELD:  Do you have a particular favorite among her 200 missives?

TOM FEYER:  Well, I’ve been the Letters editor since 1999, so I can’ say that I’ve read all 200. Actually, it’s 226, according to a search in my Nexus database. There was one June 7th, 2013. It was referring to an article, “Too Old to Judge, Albany Considers Raising Age Limits for State’s Courts.” And she wrote, “Rather than treating judges as incompetent once they reach a certain age, New York should rely on nondiscriminatory procedures for removing all incompetent judges from office, regardless of age.” I think that is a somewhat typical letter, in that one of your things is prejudice against old people.

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  I’m 66 now, but I’ve been concerned with that. In fact, I’ve had that all my life.

BOB GARFIELD:  Felicia Nimue, it’s one thing to have a bête noir, as I believe you could describe your feelings about age discrimination in all of its forms, and another to have a hobby horse that you can be depended on to just constantly flog. Have you been cautioned by Tom or anybody else about riding the horse just too hard?

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Not really, and I think that’s partly because I write letters on a lot of other subjects too. For example, I’m very interested in the discrimination and hostility toward fat people - I used to be fat, although I’m not now - the assumption that people who overeat have eating disorders but people who take risks like climbing mountains don’t have mountaineering disorders.

  [LAUGHTER]

I’m very out of sympathy with the therapeutic view of life, which takes unconventionality to be a kind of mental illness. I’m very concerned about privacy in the workplace, the idea that your employer should not be telling you what to eat, what kind of health habits to have, what to do in your free time, and so forth. I’m concerned about self-righteousness, people who criticize other people for using air conditioning, for example. I’m concerned about internet bashing.

One of my most recent letters in the Magazine said, “If you can’t experience the real world by sitting in front of a screen, how can you experience by reading? Books divert our attention from the world around us too, and it’s a good thing. Books and screens let us exercise our uniquely human capacity to transcend our immediate surroundings and enter the world of the imagination.” So I write about quite a lot of things, other than old age.

BOB GARFIELD:  I want to ask you final thing, Felicia Nimue. Most writers who have enduring relationships with editors have relationships with [LAUGHS] those editors, and yet, this is really the first time you and Tom have ever spoken. Now that you have his undivided attention, face to face, more or less, have you anything you’d like to share?

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Basically, that I’m pleased when he runs my letters, and I think they’re intelligently edited, and I’m happy with the whole situation. And I realize this is most uninteresting but, in fact, that’s what my reaction is.

BOB GARFIELD:  Would you like a redirect, Tom?

TOM FEYER:  One suggestion I would make, and you can disregard it, if you like, because you send so many letters, obviously, if you send five letters a day, which you sometimes do, we’re gonna run, at most, one of those letters. So, if you have a particular favorite, let me know, not that that guarantees we’ll pick it, but I won’t have to choose among the five.

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Thank you very much. I will do that in the future.

BOB GARFIELD:  Well, I must say that for OTM’s part, I’m just so happy that we could have made this encounter possible. And I’m getting a little choked up. Felicia Nimue, Tom, thank you so much.

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN:  Thank you.

TOM FEYER:  Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD:   Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a prolific letter writer and professor of philosophy at Brown University. Tom Feyer is the Letters editor for the New York Times.