OUT OF JOINT

I am astonished at your decision, revealed in the Winter issue's "Letter From the Editor," to greet the year 2000 as the start of the twenty-first century. Surely all of your readers are savvy and literate enough to know that January 1, 2001, is the beginning of the third millennium. The facts concerning the development of the current calendar (most especially that there was no year zero when the sequencing from B.c. to A.D. was defined in the mid-500s) are beyond question or debate. As a marketer, I understood why businesses of all kinds used the odometer shift from 1999 to 2000 as a promotional come-on, but The American Scholar? Tve never seen a retraction within your pages, but time is not running out. Yet. Donald D. O'Brien