Paul Tough is a former

Paul Tough is a former editor at Harpers. He also co-published a great zine, called Paris in the 20s, which consisted entirely of clippings of strange reporting from the New York Times. I met Paul when he came to the Wired offices to talk about possibly working for an ill-fated spin-off magazine. We had lunch together and I thought he was very nice and funny. Now he has a new daily site, called Open Letters, "a new magazine of first-person writing in the form of personal correspondence." He writes that he came up with the idea for the site from the way he worked at Harper's: "One editors' trick I started using a while ago is to ask a thwarted writer to start off by writing me a letter on the topic. What comes out is often much more fluid, funny, on-topic, and well-structured than a formal magazine article."