Earlier this summer, Choire Sicha, the writer, editor, and co-founder of the Awl, came to an unpleasant realization. His emails, he noticed, had veered into the realm of the ridiculous.
“Suddenly, one day,” he recalls, “I was delivering drifting, whiny telegraphs instead of emails: ‘Hey… this is great… I don’t know when I’ll get to an edit but… one thing is you should think about the ending there… but maybe I’ll find one in the middle for you, so don’t worry too much…okay more soon!’ ”