Frank Warren defies Ben Franklin’s morbidly cynical adage that “three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead” by posting his fans’ secrets on the most open forum in the world: the Internet. Warren’s PostSecret project, which originated on the walls of D.C.’s Art-O-Matic and in the back pages of Washington City Paper, is astoundingly simple: Take a secret, write it on an anonymous postcard, and mail it to Warren’s home address. Warren gets around 1,000 postcards every week and posts a handful every Sunday to the PostSecret blog. Usually, he chooses the ones that express specific incidents that become universal burdens: “I am not ambitious enough for my own dreams”; “I want to use cocaine again so I can lose the extra weight”; “My husband doesn’t know I have a secret savings account.” Warren’s fans have compared his speaking engagements, at which he projects secrets onto a huge screen and then allows audience members to come to the stage and confess their own secrets over a microphone, to absolution. Who doesn’t need to come clean every now and again?

WARREN SPEAKS AT 7:30 P.M. AT GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY’S LISNER AUDITORIUM, 730 21ST ST. NW. $10. (301) 808-6900.