TO THE EDITOR.(The Talk of the Town)

Katie, a sixteen-year-old from Lexington, Kentucky, has advice for anyone hoping to get a letter published in the Times: "In such a small space, your letter has to convey a lot of passion. You really have to care about what you're saying." "They get a lot of letters that are really formal," Riaz, sixteen, of Alpharetta, Georgia, says. "When they hear letters that are frank and in a common voice, they like that." "But you have to sound intelligent," Chris, sixteen, from Lansing, Kansas, notes. "You can't write it on a third-grade level, because the New York Times isn't a third-grade-level paper. It's for a more sophisticated kind of person--at least, that's what I believe."

These young experts belong to what is probably the most successful group of letter writers in the paper's history: Mark Duckenfield's 2004 international-relations class at Duke University's summer program for gifted students. Duckenfield has taught similar classes on and off for the past twelve years, and has always made writing to the Times an assignment. "It's a good way to get them to feel engaged with the stories," he said, from his current post at the London School of Economics. But none of Duckenfield's pupils had ever had their letters accepted until this year, when, in the space of one month, his twenty-nine high-school freshmen and sophomores got seventeen letters into print.

The Duke program has two three-week terms. Duckenfield's students broke the Times barrier on the last day of the first term, with David's letter defending the South Korean presence in Iraq. The next day, a second student's letter appeared, on the subject of a 9/11 memorial. Two days after that, with the first-term kids already back home, they learned that the paper had published three more of their letters. "Of course, they were on Internet pornography," Duckenfield said. "But they were quite good letters."

Pleased by this success, Duckenfield gave his second-term students a challenge. "I said, 'If you can do better than the first session, I'll buy you a Vermonster' "--a twenty-scoop sundae from Ben & Jerry's. The results came slowly at first. Andrew's pithy rejoinder to Barbara Ehrenreich was published on July 18th. On the 22nd, Katie defended Linda Ronstadt, and Riaz argued that "Yasir Arafat's incompetence is the best thing that has happened to Israeli neocons." On the 27th, Claire, Reed, and Riaz held what amounted to an intramural debate on the Democratic Convention, and Chris weighed in on a story about a concept car with facial expressions. "I am an old-fashioned man who likes his car to be just that, a car," he wrote with authority, having had his learner's permit for more than a year. On August 1st, the Times ran five letters about the differences between American and European attitudes toward work. Four were from ...