I’d like to know what the modern substitute is for long personal letters like Feynman’s? It’s not just Feynman; look at this list from the featured website: > written correspondence includes letters from: Jane Austen, Richard Burton, Helen Keller, Alan Turing, Albus Dumbledore, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry James, Sylvia Plath, John Lennon, Gerald Durrell, Janis Joplin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hunter S. Thompson, C. G. J…
Communication is shorter because it is more frequent.
If you can keep people constantly updated about whatever, there is no need to write a long letter essentially repeating yourself.
Quite. Much of the cult status of Feynman was created by the man himself. He had several books written espousing his genius. As for his charm - salesmen are charming, psychopaths are charming. Charm is a 5 letter word for manipulative, as many of his colleagues wives discovered.
Charming people are charming. The word is just a shorthand for people who are able to express themselves in a way that puts other people at ease and engenders a positive emotional state. It’s pretty much an unmitigated positive trait. Like any positive trait it can be paired with all sorts of other characteristics positive or negative. But there’s really just nothing wrong with being charming, and no moral authority…
Perhaps it's neither a positive nor a negative trait, but rather a power with which comes the responsibility to use it for positive purposes?
I’d like to know what the modern substitute is for long personal letters like Feynman’s? It’s not just Feynman; look at this list from the featured website: > written correspondence includes letters from: Jane Austen, Richard Burton, Helen Keller, Alan Turing, Albus Dumbledore, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry James, Sylvia Plath, John Lennon, Gerald Durrell, Janis Joplin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hunter S. Thompson, C. G. J…
Long letters are not dead. I have a short list of old friends whom I communicate via the infrequent long email only. These are old acquaintances with whom I have no regular business with, and they have moved far away in life, so short texting conversations are irrelevant. Usually I initiate these "pen pals" by reaching out on Christmas or Eid, several years after we have lost contact, and I make it clear to them that I want to maintain infrequent long correspondence. Usually they are overjoyed and respond with great enthusiasm, as they may have never received or written a long personal letter before in their life. It often has a powerful effect on people. In terms of content, I try to avoid making the letter too personal, because we have been far separated in time and place, sharing only major milestones in life. The fact that I don't use Facebook or any social media at all helps, because people have NOT seen what I've been up to, nor have I seen what they have been doing. I believe the long letter works better than social media -- you can maintain deep, meaningful relationships, with people far away and long ago, with people of the same and opposite gender, without getting involved in the muck of social media.
I’d like to know what the modern substitute is for long personal letters like Feynman’s? It’s not just Feynman; look at this list from the featured website: > written correspondence includes letters from: Jane Austen, Richard Burton, Helen Keller, Alan Turing, Albus Dumbledore, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry James, Sylvia Plath, John Lennon, Gerald Durrell, Janis Joplin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hunter S. Thompson, C. G. J…
Perhaps blog posts?
That’s publishing. I’m asking about one to one communication. Like the long personal letter Feynman wrote to his colleague. People seem to do much less of that.
“The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to.” The ones we can solve right now? Or the ones we might solve eventually... if we make the right choices and exert the right effort?
I’d like to know what the modern substitute is for long personal letters like Feynman’s? It’s not just Feynman; look at this list from the featured website: > written correspondence includes letters from: Jane Austen, Richard Burton, Helen Keller, Alan Turing, Albus Dumbledore, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry James, Sylvia Plath, John Lennon, Gerald Durrell, Janis Joplin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hunter S. Thompson, C. G. J…
It’s a result of how long it took to send messages (days to months, depending on where the recipient was), and that it didn’t usually cost more to send six sheets of paper than one. You wanted to make sure to write everything you had to say.
[edit] it should be added that most of the people whose long letters are interesting and well-written enough that we still care about them were educated a particular kind of way, or at least were immersed in a culture of those who were. Classics and rhetoric—as in, they most likely read and considered parts of Ars Rhetorica during their education—to a much greater degree than we treat those subjects now. We move farther every year, it seems, from considering those to have any value for most people.
I’d like to know what the modern substitute is for long personal letters like Feynman’s? It’s not just Feynman; look at this list from the featured website: > written correspondence includes letters from: Jane Austen, Richard Burton, Helen Keller, Alan Turing, Albus Dumbledore, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry James, Sylvia Plath, John Lennon, Gerald Durrell, Janis Joplin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hunter S. Thompson, C. G. J…
When I hear people refer to this as a long letter, I weep.
Just 20-30 years ago this was merely a letter. Most of my hand written letters were longer.
Feynman, like everyone, has his virtues and vices, but humility is definitely not among his strong points. The majority of the stories he tells about himself are anecdotes in which he is the smart person in the room making (maybe lighthearted and friendly) fun of others with a cheaply superficial pretence of humility.
I just finished reading _Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!_ and I agree - the word that described most of his stories to me was "boastful". Most of his stories involve him being more clever than everyone else around him, rather pointedly. However, whenever he talks about getting recruited or being tasked with something important, he always claimed to be astonished that anyone thought "little Feynman" worthy of such…
>Most of his stories involve him being more clever than everyone else around him, rather pointedly.
Well, what would you have expected him to write? He was more clever than everyone around him in virtually every room he was in, for his whole life. Usain Bolt's biography would not have very many stories about the times he was outrun by people. Feynman had a healthy attitude about assigned-at-birth characteristics, he didn't deny them, but he didn't let them make him insufferable either.
I’d like to know what the modern substitute is for long personal letters like Feynman’s? It’s not just Feynman; look at this list from the featured website: > written correspondence includes letters from: Jane Austen, Richard Burton, Helen Keller, Alan Turing, Albus Dumbledore, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry James, Sylvia Plath, John Lennon, Gerald Durrell, Janis Joplin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hunter S. Thompson, C. G. J…
I think this is mainly a problem of social norms- there are few contexts today where people assume you want to have long-form discussion without you going out on a limb and stating it explicitly. Asking someone to coffee is one that still exists; I do this with friends sometimes. But another alternative is to just take that step and explicitly state what you'd like to do. It might be a little awkward, but I bet many people would be receptive.
Or to put it differently, "put your own small dent in the universe"
A couple years ago I built a new website for a local shop. It was a straightforward project - a problem I "could really solve easily" - but it had a real and material impact on the lives of some wonderful people who in turn had a material impact on their community. I sometimes look back at that work as being, in certain ways, more fulfilling than any of the more challenging work I've done since.