When I was 15, I wrote a letter to my boyfriend complaining about an annoying aunt.  My grandmother was dying and she had specifically warned me that this relative would be the first to “pick over my things.”  I happened to mention that, and I guess I didn’t put the letter in an envelope because the aunt found it and my mother delivered a lecture about not putting negative things in writing.

Emails are so much more dangerous than letters; they last longer, are really easy to forward and apparently they can never really be erased and can come back to bite you as illustrated by the  Petraeus/Broadwell/Kelly/Allen saga.   New rule:  don’t put anything in an email that you don’t want to see in the New York Times.