(Laughter) Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, "Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!"
But then, as the viewership kept growing and kept growing, I started getting letters from people, and it was starting to become clear that it was more than just a nice-to-have.
And then a few other things started to dawn on me; that not only would it help my cousins right now, or these people who were sending letters, but that this content will never grow old, that it could help their kids or their grandkids.
(Laughter) But sometimes -- (Laughter) But sometimes I also do get -- I wouldn't call it hate mail -- but letters of really strong concern: "Dr. Hong, are you insane, trying to put blind people on the road?
And Darwin himself mused in a letter to a colleague that he thought that life probably emerged in some warm little pond somewhere -- maybe not in Scotland, maybe in Africa, maybe somewhere else.
And as I looked into his eyes, I realized that for the hundreds of letters I had written for political prisoners, that I would never have written a letter for him, because he was not a 12-year-old boy who had done something important for anybody.
(Laughter) And another one wrote a whole chapter saying that he would believe it had something to do with fairness, if the one who got grapes would refuse the grapes.
"The Grey Album" becomes an immediate sensation online, and the Beatles' record company sends out countless cease-and-desist letters for "unfair competition and dilution of our valuable property."
I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city, dozens and dozens of them. I left them everywhere, in cafes and in libraries, at the U.N., everywhere.
I blogged about those letters and the days when they were necessary, and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the Internet: that if you asked me for a hand-written letter, I would write you one, no questions asked.
But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper.
Well, tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow, scripted by strangers who were there for him when.
嫌がらせの手紙に 最高の結びは こうです 「愛を込めて マーカム 4才」 これは今でも通用します
And it's a very effective way of ending your hate mail: "Love Markham, Aged 4." Still works.
And then six months later, or nine months after the problem had taken, I got this delightful letter with a picture of the baby asking if I'd be godfather, which I became.
As I unwrapped it, I began to cry, and my mother came over and said, 'Are you crying because of the relatives you never knew?' And I said, 'She had the same disease I have.' I'm crying now as I write to you.
When I got that letter from my son, I began to write a journal about things I had experienced in my childhood and in prison, and what it did is it opened up my mind to the idea of atonement.
The one which was tapping phone calls was completely separated from the one which controlled the letters, for good reasons, because if one agent quit the Stasi, his knowledge was very small.
(Laughter) (Applause) And it's been amazing, because the series was so welcomed into the reading lives of children, and they sent me the most amazing letters and cards and artwork.
He composed a letter, addressing his synagogue congregation, and ended it with the following lines: "When my nape exploded, I entered another dimension: inchoate, sub-planetary, protozoan.
What you are sending, in many ways, is actually a postcard, and it's a postcard in the sense that everybody that sees it from the time it leaves your computer to when it gets to the recipient can actually read the entire contents.
Today, if I could respond to my students with a letter of my own, which is of course impossible, I would tell them this: "My dear gentlemen, It's been a bit over three years since I last saw you.
Because I'm me, I put the letter on my kitchen table, I poured myself a giant glass of vodka with ice and lime, and I sat there in my underwear for an entire day, just staring at the letter.
They would hope that in each of these district offices, an officer would get the letter, would open it, read it and then forward it to the next level, which was the block offices.
And then you would hope that at the block office, somebody else got the letter, opened it, read it and forwarded it eventually to the 15, 000 principals.
So there he went, and there he spent his days alone, writing letters and letters to the French government begging them to reopen his case so they could discover his innocence.
Inside it was every single letter he had ever received from visitors from abroad, and on some of them he had pasted little black-and-white worn snapshots of his new foreign friends.
But these letters serve a purpose, which is that they tell your friends and family what you did in your personal life that mattered to you over the year.
Interestingly, it was during those years in prison that a series of letters redeemed me, helped me move beyond the darkness and the guilt associated with the worst moment of my young life.
So we put his writings, letters, his interviews, correspondences, into a huge database of thousands of pages, and then used some natural language processing to allow you to actually have a conversation with him.
Three years ago he got a letter signed by all 700 employees of La Scala, musical employees, I mean the musicians, saying, "You're a great conductor. We don't want to work with you. Please resign."
(Laughter) Well, so the newspaper in Cambridge published an article about that "discovery" and received the next day 5, 000 letters from people saying, "But that's simply a Mandelbrot set very big."
And we then got a letter just this week from the company who wrote it, wanting to track down the source -- (Laughter) saying, "Hey, we want to track down the source."
In fact, an African philosopher wrote to me, when "Prosperity Without Growth" was published, pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional African concept of ubuntu.
2.1372411251068s
Download our Word Games app for free!
Connect letters, discover words, and challenge your mind at every new level. Ready for the adventure?
(Laughter) Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, "Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!" 