April 29--The apology to the old classmate who emailed you last year that he was coming to town -- and never heard back from you.
The responses you've never written to the people who offered heartfelt condolences after the death of your grandfather.
The note explaining to your first girlfriend why you essentially dumped her without explanation, even standing her up at her prom, when everything seemed to be going great.
If you've got these or similar items showing up week after week, year after year, on your to-do list, weighing on your very notion of yourself as a pretty good person, Saturday is the day for you.
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With a push from the people behind the "Reply All" podcast April 30 is becoming known, slowly but hopefully inexorably, as "Email Debt Forgiveness Day." It's a combination of spring cleaning and atonement, of contemporary technology and old-fashioned decency, that lets you right, or at least explain, old wrongs.
"You can email whoever you've been meaning to email and been emotionally paralyzed and unable to email, and you're allowed to email them as if you are responding to their email in a timely fashion," "Reply All" cohost PJ Vogt explained in announcing the holiday last April.
"It sounds like something that not only do you and I need," co-host Alex Goldman said, "but it sounds like something the world needs."
Yes. And then they laughed at the absurdity of "picking an arbitrary date one day a year," and the following week they did an episode about what a "Pandora's box" Email Debt Forgiveness Day could be. Still, the holiday exists in concept, if not yet on the boilerplate of most digital calendars, and it should be taken advantage of.
"Reply All" -- a show ostensibly about Internet culture that has risen in the past year to become No. 1 on my personal podcast list -- offers a page you can link to on its website to include in your email, sparing you the need for a long wind-up about why it's taken so long for you to reply/explain/say you're sorry and why you're doing it now.
Vogt's personal example was an email due to a former teacher who had congratulated him on the podcast, one that he knew he'd put too much pressure on himself to make perfect and thus not get around to doing and thus need it to be even more perfect the more time that passed.
Goldman's example was an email from members of his semi-defunct rock band proposing they get together for one last show before one member moved out of New York. "I just don't want to practice," he explained. "Everybody else lives in Brooklyn and I live in New Jersey."
The third example at the start of this story, from a guy in Texas, is one that "Reply All" told in this year's episode reminding people of Email Debt Forgiveness Day. The man had backed out of the relationship more than a decade earlier, he wanted to explain, because its physical progression had conflicted with his religious beliefs, but he hadn't been able to bring himself to just say that. And it still ate him up.
"Reply All" is a very popular but not staggeringly popular podcast. It currently shows up in the 40s in the iTunes charts (the caveat about iTunes podcast rankings is that they reward what's trending along with what's popular, Nicholas Quah has explained in his Hot Pod newsletter for Nieman Lab, so that a show with many new listeners might outrank a show with more overall listeners).
But since its debut in 2014 -- and after the magic of the first seasons of "Serial" and "Startup" has worn off -- this show has become my first choice whenever a new episode pops up. I mention this because the conversation people have when they discover a fellow podcast listener starts right away with, "What do you listen to?"
My own caveat is that I don't include in my personal rankings the shows that have big radio presences alongside their podcast preeminence: the likes of "This American Life," "Radiolab" and "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me!"
What's becoming increasingly apparent to me about "Reply All" is that it works for the same reason "Car Talk" worked in the heyday of public radio.
The show's nominal subject matter is human stories with a connection to the Internet, such as the couple who turned their toddler's cancer treatment into a video game and whatever happened to the woman in Jennicam, the first person to webcast her life.
It'll also do quick-take explainers on confounding memes, with the "RA" hosts attempting to explain things to Alex Blumberg, cofounder of Gimlet Media, the podcasting outfit chronicled in "Startup" season 1 that produces "Reply All."
But just as "Car Talk" did a fine job on matters of vehicular incontinence but was really about the camaraderie between the hosts, brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi, "Reply All" achieves that extra level of satisfaction because Vogt and Goldman share their delight and frustration in each other on the air.
This feels like a real human friendship trying to work in the crucible of producing a weekly audio half-hour (or so). And one of the features of that camaraderie is their attempts to be decent to each other and to the world around them, which led to the Debt Forgiveness Day impulse.
Well, that and the need to make a weekly show, because the holiday has led to some pretty good podcast material, too.
Vogt and Goldman cautioned that the need to send these emails may be more about you than about the recipient. Just as nobody pays nearly as much attention to you when you're dancing as you think they do, most of the unanswered mail that's been weighing on you probably hasn't been thought of by the person on the other end in a long time.
So send that email with forethought. Be aware of the Pandora's box potential. But take advantage of the chance to clean up at least some of your messes. The world is full of dumb new holidays concocted mostly for commercial reasons. This one requires no greeting card, no bouquet, just a look in the mirror, some time at the keyboard, and, at last, a click on the "Send" arrow.
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
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