when Paul Tough met Ian Brown for a pint at the Munster Hall, a traditional English alehouse in downtown Toronto. The two journalists met to talk about ideas. Tough, a Toronto-born editor who cut his teeth at Harpers magazine in New York, had recently resigned from his position as editor of Saturday Night magazine and was in the process of deciding what do with the rest of his life -- or at least where to direct his energy after he packed up his desk. He told Brown, a freelance writer and the host of CBC Radio's Talking Books, about a project he had been mentally toying with for a while. It involved letters. A whole magazine of letters, in fact."