A few years ago, Davy Rothbart found a piece of paper tucked under the windscreen-wiper of a car on his street in Chicago. Addressed to "Mario", and signed by "Amber", it was an accusatory note, laced with expletives. "You said you have to work," Amber wrote. "Then why's your car here, at her place? I hate you."

Maybe Mario was a cheat, but you can't help feeling a twinge of pity for him, given that the note was actually tucked under the wiper of Rothbart's own car - Mario's vehicle, perhaps, being in the car-park at work, like he said.

At that point, Rothbart thought he had a minority hobby, compulsively picking up and preserving the scraps of paper - notes, love- letters, to-do lists - that he found blowing around the streets of his hometown. But then he launched Found Magazine (www.foundmagazine.com), to showcase his finds. And now it turns out that everybody's been doing it for years.

One radio presenter, interviewing Rothbart as part of a publicity tour for Found, recalled a to-do list his daughter discovered on the floor of a sports shop, setting out plans for what sounded like an energetic action holiday. "Snorkelling, golf, tennis, make love to Jennifer," it said.

"I always collected this stuff, but I've been stunned - so many people are excited by the same thing, and they've been sending things in to us," said Rothbart, a 27-year-old writer and former ticket-tout, who stopped off in Brooklyn the other day to launch Found's second issue, the first to be distributed nationally in the US.

Someone found a piece of paper folded up and hidden in a tree in rural Georgia. "This was a beautiful spot that helped me say goodbye," it said. A large notice was left on the street, its message printed in neat, bold marker-pen: "Andrei von Blackwell does not do drugs. Past. Present. Future."

But it was the unfinished story of Amber and Mario that moved Rothbart the most. "Mario, I fucking hate you," Amber's note read. "You're a fucking liar. I fucking hate you. I hate you. PS. Page me later."

"'Page me later' - look at all the complicated emotions going on in that," Rothbart mused. "Even when I was a kid, I remember being amazed at how powerfully you could connect with someone just through a few words of a note they'd left behind. It's the economy of the language - in a few words, there's a story, or part of a story. You have to fill in the rest. And you find you recognise yourself in their stories."

You might also expect to find a few people furious or hurt that their private communications had been published in print and online. "In the first issue, there was an email this woman had written and somebody had printed out and left behind at a computer centre, telling how she'd broken up with her old boyfriend and had a new boyfriend," Rothbart said. "She wasn't angry, she was just surprised that people would be interested. I told her I thought it was because a lot of us have confusions over our relationships, and when we laugh, we're not mocking. Some people think it's voyeuristic. I agree completely, but I think a certain degree of voyeurism is healthy. We're all curious about the people who live around us."

Now people have started sending photos to Found. Someone sent a door, because it had a message painted on it. Another sent a dead frog. "After that I had to say - no more dead animals."

· News of a nerve-racking standoff between police and an unknown person at a house in north Seattle. The cops arrived at 7.30am, following a somewhat confused tip-off, and for the next five hours used every technique in the book to coax the presumably gun-toting person inside out of the building and into custody. They called in a heavily armed Swat team. They pumped barrage after barrage of tear gas through the windows. They called on specialist negotiators. At one point, the door opened slightly. A desperate gunman, choking on tear gas, seeking fresh air, perhaps? But then - nothing. Tensions mounted. Finally, at 12.30pm, police stormed the house, no doubt baffling and terrifying its sole occupant ... a dog.

The dog must have pushed the door open, said police spokesman Duane Fish, deploying faultless logic. It was physically unharmed. Right. But like that's going to stop it from suing.