We have never published the names or photographs of our correspondents, and we have never filmed the Symposium or the Summits. That is a choice, and we owe readers the reason for it.

Our correspondents are ordinary working people. They have employers, customers, neighbors, and children in local schools. In a country where an unpopular opinion can cost someone a job or a client, asking them to sign their names would mean hearing only from people with nothing to lose. We would rather hear from the freight manager and the insurance agent than from the professional commentator who can afford the heat.

The same reasoning keeps cameras out of the room. People argue differently when they know a clip of their worst sentence can travel without the rest of the paragraph. Without cameras, they can test an idea, concede a point, and change their minds, which is the whole purpose of sitting down together.

The practice is not new. The Federalist Papers ran under the name Publius. Many serious publications still run unsigned work, so that readers judge the argument rather than the author.

That does not mean no one answers for the work. Each correspondent writes from a real place and a real trade, described on this page, and the steward of Thinking Outside the Boxe signs his name to what we publish and answers for it. Judge the arguments on their merits. That is what they are here for.