Children are a delight. They are our future. But sadly, hiring someone to take care of them when you're going to work is getting more expensive by the year.

Earlier this month it was reported that the cost of involving an infant or small kid at a childcare centre rose 3 percent in 2012, faster than the general cost of living. There are now large strips of the country where daycare（日托）for an infant costs more than 10%of the average married couples' income.

This is not necessarily a new trend, but it is somewhat puzzling me. The price of professional childcare has been rising since the 1980s. Yet during that time, pay for professional childcare workers has stood still Actually caregivers（护理员）earn less today than they did in 1990. Considering that labor costs are responsible for about 80% of a daycare center's expenses, one would infer that stable wages means stable prices.

So who is to blame for higher child care costs?

Childcare is a carefully regulated industry. States lay down rules about how many children each employee is allowed to watch over, the space care centers need per child, and other details. And the stricter the regulations are, the higher the costs will be. In Massachusetts. where childcare centers must hire one teacher for every three infants, the price of care averaged more than $ 16,000 per year. In Mississippi, where centers must hire one teacher for every five infants, the price of care averaged less than $ 5,000.

Unfortunately, I don't have all the daycare center regulations, but I wouldn't be surprised if as the rules. have become more complicated, prices have risen. The tradeoff （交换）might be worth it in certain cases, after all, the health and safety of children should probably come before cheap service. But certainly, it doesn't seem to be an accident that some of the cheapest daycare available is in the least regulated South.

“A novel, like a letter should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of morality and decay,” Saul Bellow once wrote. Like many novelists, in his spare time the author of The Adventures of Augie March was also an enthusiastic letter writer.

A selection of Bellow’s huge correspondence, reproduced in a recent issue of the New Yorker, provides a fascinating insight into the writer’s character. Witty, often brief and almost always entertaining, Bellow’s letters are a reminder of why writers’ letters often prove so popular with readers. At their best, literary letters have something for everyone: general readers get a glimpse of how authors write when freed from the expectation to produce a work of conventional literary worth, and scholars get enough scholarly writings.

All this is well and good—except for one small problem: nobody writes letters anymore, at least not the kind of intellectual, humorous letters that distinguish great correspondence. As we are so often told, we live in the digital age. Like the rest of us, authors now largely correspond with their agents, friends, and occasionally, fans through email, not “snail mail”.   

As literary vehicles, emails are severely lacking. Digital messages tend to alternate between the deathly dull and formal and the casually daring complete with BTW, LOLs and unclear text—speak with little middle ground. Letters can be revealing, friendly, humorous; emails, even at their best, tend to exhibit only one of these characteristics of good writing.

Future literary archivists (档案管理员) will need to be digital experts, hacking through hard drives and email accounts, mobile phones, in their attempts to fully document the lives and thoughts of their subjects. But who among us has all their email correspondence from the past five years, let alone a lifetime? Hardware is disposed (废弃) of and forgotten about; mobile phones are replaced every few years. The idea that we can construct a complete record of a writer has always been unrealistic, but technological advances have made it physically impossible, too. With so much material digitalized, and often wiped, writers will no longer leave behind boxes suffered with letters, ripe for investigation and possible publication.

Back in 1898, the New York Times named the long-dead Lord Byron the greatest letter writer in the English language, celebrating his letters’ humor, the force and spirit of their substance, the grace and purity of their style. Saul Bellow’s letters might not be remembered quite so fondly 70 years from now, but chances are that, by then, the entire genre of collected writers’ letters will have disappeared completely—leaving readers significantly poorer for their loss.