Every year around this time, college admissions officers can be heard humblebragging about how painful it was to reject so many qualified applicants. This year, Stanford, the most selective of the bunch, received more than forty thousand applications and accepted 5.07 per cent of them. (Harvard, with its acceptance rate of 5.9 per cent, is soon to be overrun with riffraff.) Numbers like these make running for President seem plausible: in 2012, twenty-six people competed for the job, for an acceptance rate of 3.8 per cent. But none of these institutions is as selective as the Times, which receives more than a thousand letters a day and prints approximately one per cent of them.
Felicia Nimue Ackerman—“Felicia Nimue is a double first name like Mary Jane, and I’m called the whole thing”—is a short-story writer and a philosophy professor at Brown, and she excels at crafting arguments concisely. Since 1987, the Times has printed more than two hundred of her letters, which is either a record or close to one. Tom Feyer, the letters editor, doesn’t keep count, but he named Ackerman as a top contender for first place. “Some days she sends several letters, each in response to a different article,” he said. “Although I don’t know her personally, I have a good sense of how she thinks.” In 2006, IvyGate, a gossip blog covering the Ivy League, published a post under the headline “New N.Y. Times Policy Requires All Letters to Be From Single Brown Professor.” The following year, Gawker wrote a post about one of Ackerman’s letters (“Ivy Professor: Sundaes Are Yummy!,” and a commenter wrote, “I used to edit the letters column for one of the pull-out sections in the Times, and we had a rule against running too many Felicia Ackermans…. One woman wrote us one time asking if her chances of having her letter published would be significantly improved if she signed her letter Felicia Ackerman.”
“I should emphasize that my acceptance rate is quite low,” Ackerman said recently. “I send a lot of letters.” She speaks nasally and quickly and hypergrammatically, eschewing filler words. (On February 3, 2012, responding to a Times article about Asperger’s syndrome, she wrote that she had been brought up “in 1950s Brooklyn, where nerdiness was a respectable way of being, not a ‘syndrome.’ ”) Her office in Providence looks like the tent of a fortune-teller in a travelling circus: batik pillows, decorative quilts, amethysts, kaleidoscopes, silver goblets. The walls are covered in oil paintings and soft-lit photographs of her cat, Palomides, who is her only roommate. (February 29, 2012: “The fact that living alone may make it ‘difficult to go back to living with someone else’ is a disadvantage only to people who anticipate ever wanting to go back to that.”) Her areas of expertise include bioethics, the philosophy of fiction, and the fifteenth-century author Thomas Malory, whose works line her bookshelf. (Her best-loved copy of “Le Morte d’Arthur,” which she carries around in a shopping bag, looks like it has been read several thousand times.) On a recent Wednesday, she wore red lipstick, blue eye shadow, red-rimmed glasses, four bronze rings, two turquoise rings, a complex silver necklace, a black-and-yellow robe from Afghanistan, and a burlap coxcomb hat from Cameroon. “I used to indulge in food,” she said. “I looked horrible—I looked as if I’d been squashed—but I didn’t care. I then decided that I would probably live longer if I was less fat, and that quantity of life was more important than quality. So now I indulge in clothes instead.” (April 17, 2005: “I came from a happy family. I overate for the deep psychological reason that fattening foods taste terrific and eating them is delightful.”)
When asked a question, she occasionally pauses to say something like “Let me formulate a persuasive response to this, which I haven’t had to until now.” More often, she answers questions as soon as they are asked, if not sooner. “I don’t like David Brooks,” she said. “I don’t agree with many of his positions, and I don’t think they’re strongly argued.” She has tangled with him several times in print. Yet she tries to avoid “kneejerk liberalism,” and she has argued against “nanny state” restrictions on smoking and sugary drinks. (May 18, 2008: “If people whose overeating puts them at risk for illness and early death have eating disorders, why don’t we say that people whose mountaineering puts them at risk for injury and early death have mountaineering disorders?”)
She responds to articles on a variety of topics—ageism, fatism, “society’s tendency to medicalize virtually everything”—but her underlying interest is in personal freedom. Employers should stop telling employees what to do with their free time; self-righteous people should stop “monitoring their friends and neighbors for environmental purity”; parents should stop worrying about whether violent video games have redeeming social value (“Isn’t it high time we directed our attention to the world’s real ills and stopped policing people’s fantasy lives?”). The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to stay alive, and Ackerman argues that “death with dignity” is often a euphemism for coercion. She insists that everyone, no matter how ill or decrepit, is equally justified in clinging to life. (March 13, 2005: “I would like to know why so many of my fellow bioethicists are so ready to say that someone else’s life is not worth living.”)
Nevertheless, she rejects the notion that her letter-writing amounts to advocacy. “I don’t believe that my opinions are likely to make the world a better place,” she said. “I hope I never get such a puffed-up view of myself. I write letters because I enjoy it.” Last August, the Times Book Review published an essay about the enduring popularity of the poem “Trees,” by Joyce Kilmer. Two weeks later, the paper ran a response by Ackerman: “I think that if I had a choice, / I’d never read a fool like Joyce.”
A previous version of this article stated that the essay on “Trees” appeared in the Times rather than the Times Book Review, and that Ackerman’s response was published the following day.
Illustration by Miguel Porlan.
