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Episode One - Fan Mail
From Binnie Klein | Part of the The Thread: Conversations with Arts and Culture Makers series | 29:40
In the age of texts, twitter and email, do people still write fan letters? What compels us to do so?
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- Episode One - Fan Mail
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- Binnie Klein
Author Joanna Rakoff (My Salinger Year) spent her first job in publishing answering the reclusive JD Salinger's voluminous fan mail. Lynn Snowden Picket (Looking For a Fight) was obsessed with celebrities as a child. She had fantasies of lunching with the Beatles. She's proud of having written a letter to football player Joe Namath. Educator Ruth Anne Baumgartner fell for an actor who played "I, Claudius" and wrote him. To her immense delight, he wrote back. And host Binnie Klein has a personal story about a curmudgeonly science fiction writer. We weave it together into a thread about admiration, arrogance, and naivete.