The Not-So-Lost Art of Letter Writing

Reading through the literary correspondence of great writers and thinkers like Sigmund Freud or Ernest Hemingway, you’d think that the immediacy of email has killed off the art of letter-writing. But new research from Northwestern University finds that great thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wrote letters in much the same way we dash off emails today.

Mathematical modeling reveals that regardless of the medium, people tend to write several letters in one sitting. And in spite of Charles Darwin's love of the scientific method, he rarely wrote his most important letters first, or used any rational method for his correspondence. And just imagine how chaotic Albert Einstein’s in-box might have been.

(Photo by kevinzim via Flickr/Creative Commons)