Dear Reader,

I’m writing to let you know that we’re creating a place online for your ideas and feedback. Our new Letters section, like its counterpart in print, will feature the smartest, most compelling responses to our journalism. It will be a venue for respectful dialogue, criticism, meaningful observations, and challenging ideas.

We want to hear from you, and we want to make it easy for anyone to find and share the most compelling responses to our journalism, and to the most pressing issues of the day.

We’ve also made the not-unrelated decision to close our comments section. Over the years, robust conversation in The Atlantic comments section has too often been hijacked by people who traffic in snark and ad hominem attacks and even racism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish invective.

Instead of hosting these sorts of unhelpful, even destructive, conversations on TheAtlantic.com, we are choosing now to elevate respectful, intelligent discourse and argument. We want smart and critical readers to have a more visible role on our site, and we’re looking forward to hearing from you, and publishing you.

To send a letter to our editors, email Letters@TheAtlantic.com.