This story was originally published on April 24, 2025, and has been updated. The art of letter writing is not dead. Rachel Syme, a New Yorker staff writer, learned that during the early days of the ...

I wondered if it was still cool for kids to write letters to Santa Claus. An old-fashioned letter, handwritten on paper, sealed in a paper envelope, with a return address and postage stamp. I used to ...

I’m a letter writer. Like my mother before me and her mother before her, I regularly put pen to paper. I know this makes me unusual: most Americans haven't written a personal letter in years. The ...

"Correspondence is a leap of faith, and that is part of what makes it wonderful," says Rachel Syme, author of Syme's Letter Writer: A Guide to Modern Correspondence. "You may never know if the person ...