My mother is 80 years-old, and she has subscribed to the New Yorker magazine since 1965, so she was surprised to receive a mean-spirited letter from them saying that if she did not respond immediately, she would be "permanently" listed in their "expired" files and that this was her "final notice". She found the letter so offensive after 53 years of devoted support to the New Yorker magazine, she decided not to renew her subscription.
So I posit the following question to the staff at the New Yorker magazine: Would it serve you better to be a little bit nicer to your loyal subscribers? They keep commenting on how rude and aggressive President Donald Trump is (and they're right about that), but presumably he didn't write that subscription renewal letter to my mother, but rather, they did. So maybe he's not the only one who is aggressive and rude.
(If it's so bad that Trump is so rude and so forth, how come all the people who report on him seem to be just as rude? He may encourage rudeness and facts not to matter, but he can't force everyone else to behave that way all by himself; we still have to decide for ourselves how to act, and we alone are responsible for the tone of our own behavior. Or do they think that's Trump's fault too?)
And I think it's probably not a good idea to say in a subscription renewal letter that if the addressee does not respond immediately, they will permanently be place in the 'expired' file; that makes it sound like they can't resubscribe later even if they send in the fee.
(My mom tells me that in the late 1960s, the New Yorker magazine offered a lifetime subscription for $100 and she wishes she had done it, but at the time, and with money worth what it was back then, she thought it was too expensive.)
