NYT Summer Reading Contest, Week 5: Honorable Mention

Melissa Kirsch’s “Love Letters” made me ache for something I hadn’t realized I’d lost: slow, sprawling conversations that filled an evening–the kind where telling someone about your day took hours, and that was the point. She writes about deleting email apps, sending postcards instead of texts, and calling friends unannounced–not because it’s efficient, but because it’s human.

We’re forgetting how to have patience–not just in how we wait, but in how we speak, how we listen, how we exist in each other’s lives. Everything must be instant now–stories told in 15 seconds, emotions squeezed into digital shorthand. But some things can’t be said quickly. Some feelings don’t fit inside a text.

I think of slow evenings with my dad, quiet dinners where time unfolded naturally, no phones. No urgency. Just presence. Even silence felt like conversation; proof we were paying attention.

We’ve convinced ourselves that shorter means smarter, that faster means better. But in doing so, we’ve hollowed out the depth of how we connect. In a world that celebrates efficiency, maybe the most radical thing we can do is take our time–with people, with conversation, with attention.

Reclaiming slow communication isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about restoring something essential: a belief that presence matters more than performance. That not everything needs to be said quickly to be worth saying. That sometimes the best kind of message is the one that takes a while to arrive–and even longer to tell.