Dear editor

A letter to Slate’s Dear Prudence advice column, published this weekend:

“Dear Prudie. My daughter is 5 years old and has, like most girls her age, a hamper’s worth of stuffed animals. While she has her favourites, she constantly wants more and usually connives to get someone into procuring a new one every couple of weeks. The new one immediately becomes her favourite and she must sleep with it every night and haul it around half the day. My question is: Does this behaviour indicate she’ll be overly promiscuous as an adult, or at least unable to commit to a single partner?”

And from this Sunday’s Letters section in the New York Times Magazine, a reader responds to a recent essay about dreaded student evaluations:

“As someone who taught English at both the high-school and college levels for 40 years, I enjoyed David Holmberg’s essay. Herewith, my all-time favourite evaluation: ‘Hes to piky!’”