Thursday, April 10, 2014

The Brown professor whose letters constantly get published in the New York Times

New Yorker:
Felicia Nimue Ackerman—“Felicia Nimue is a double first name like Mary Jane, and I’m called the whole thing”—is a short-story writer and a philosophy professor at Brown, and she excels at crafting arguments concisely. Since 1987, the Times has printed more than two hundred of her letters, which is either a record or close to one. Tom Feyer, the letters editor, doesn’t keep count, but he named Ackerman as a top contender for first place. “Some days she sends several letters, each in response to a different article,” he said. . . . Gawker wrote a post about one of Ackerman’s letters (“Ivy Professor: Sundaes Are Yummy!,” and a commenter wrote, “I used to edit the letters column for one of the pull-out sections in the Times, and we had a rule against running too many Felicia Ackermans…. One woman wrote us one time asking if her chances of having her letter published would be significantly improved if she signed her letter Felicia Ackerman.”