The Atlantic
Modern Communication’s Big Open Secret
The assumption that we are the sole authors of our texts and emails is a collective fiction but a useful one.
Updated at 1:00 p.m. ET on April 15, 2021.
In the late-19th-century play
Cyrano de Bergerac, the eloquent title character gets a woman to fall deeply in love with another man by ghostwriting letters, as him, to her. The details are a bit messy Cyrano himself is also in love with the woman, the woman is his cousin, and the other guy dies in Act IV but much of the play’s drama revolves around the letters’ secret authorship.