LOAD UP THAT SNAIL | July 8th 2008

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Tim de Lisle, editor of Intelligent Life magazine, explains why he has launched a letters page ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

This may sound odd coming from a website, but we're hoping you'll send us a letter. Maybe even by post.

Intelligent Life magazine has just launched a letters page. At first we didn't have one, for two reasons: we were quarterly, so the turnaround was going to be on the slow side; and we had the website you are looking at, which was live and kicking and ready to run your comments. But then we began to receive a few letters. Some of them were worth printing, and so were some of the comments appearing on moreintelligentlife.com. The slow turnaround turned out not to be a problem: our whole magazine is slow food. 

So the summer issue of Intelligent Life contains our first letters page, partly devoted to old-style letters, and partly to a column called Onliners, which gives quickfire excerpts from the most interesting reactions to our articles, both from this site and elsewhere on the web. So we've ended up with a mixture of the slow and the fast. The food analogy begins to waver at this point, as six-week-old fast food never did much for anyone. Anyway, it will soon be time to put together the letters page for autumn. The weather in London is doing its best to get us in the mood: it's cool, blustery and wet, even by British standards. 

So if you've got a point to make about whether men really are boring, whether life is good at 90-plus, whether Britain's bestsellers are any better or worse than America's or whether chimps and rats crack jokes, do send us a letter. 

You can write by e-mail, to intelligentlife@economist.com--please put "Letter to the editor" in the subject field; or by post, to the Editor, Intelligent Life, 25 St James's Street, London SW1A 1HG. Or if you're in America and prefer not to use an international stamp, write to the Editor, Moreintelligentlife.com, 111 West 57^th Street, New York, New York 10019, and she will pass it on. Please include a daytime telephone number, and bear in mind that letters may be edited for reasons of space or clarity. The deadline for the autumn issue is the end of July. Well, I did say it was slow food.