Heather Havrilesky (born June 1970) [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] is an American author, essayist, and humorist. She writes the advice column "Ask Polly" for Substack . She is the author of Disaster Preparedness: A Memoir, the advice book How to Be a Person in the World and the essay collection What If This Were Enough? [6] [2]
In 1996, Havrilesky was hired as a staff writer at Suck.com, a webzine that was one of the web's earliest ad-supported content sites. Together with artist Terry Colon, she wrote the popular "Filler" comic strip for the site under the pen name Polly Esther. [7] [8]
In 2001, Havrilesky started an advice column on her personal blog called Dear Rabbit. [9] In May of that year, she began writing an advice column on Suck, but the site went under a month later. [10]
Havrilesky began writing for Salon in 2003 as their TV critic. [11] In 2011, Havrilesky became one of the original columnists for The Daily , the world's first iPad-only news app. [12] Havrilesky exited that position soon after the app launched, [13] and the site was shuttered by its parent News Corporation in December 2012.
She pitched an advice column called Ask Polly to The Awl in 2012, which ran as a weekly feature. [14] New York magazine began publishing the column in 2014. [15] [16] Each column addresses a single letter requesting advice. [16]
Havrilesky's first book, Disaster Preparedness: A Memoir (2010), [17] is an autobiographical work, it dealt mostly with her upbringing in Durham, North Carolina. [18] Her second book, How to Be a Person in the World, was released in July 2016. The book was made up of new Ask Polly advice columns along with a handful of her most popular previously published columns. [19] Her third book, the essay collection What If This Were Enough? was released in 2018. [20] Erin Keane of Salon.com summarized the book as follows: "Havrilesky peels back the layers of late-capitalism malaise that bind us to the promise of some better version of ourselves lurking just beyond our reach, and dares us instead to accept our current, flawed lives, suffering and all, in order to settle into a less anxious and resentful present." [20]
Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction.
Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, and conservative political commentator. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times, and other media outlets.
An emergency is an urgent, unexpected, and usually dangerous situation that poses an immediate risk to health, life, property, or environment and requires immediate action. Most emergencies require urgent intervention to prevent a worsening of the situation, although in some situations, mitigation may not be possible and agencies may only be able to offer palliative care for the aftermath.
Survivalism is a social movement of individuals or groups who proactively prepare for emergencies, such as natural disasters, and other disasters causing disruption to social order caused by political or economic crises. Preparations may anticipate short-term scenarios or long-term, on scales ranging from personal adversity, to local disruption of services, to international or global catastrophe. There is no bright line dividing general emergency preparedness from prepping in the form of survivalism, but a qualitative distinction is often recognized whereby preppers/survivalists prepare especially extensively because they have higher estimations of the risk of catastrophes happening. Nonetheless, prepping can be as limited as preparing for a personal emergency, or it can be as extensive as a personal identity or collective identity with a devoted lifestyle.
Preparations for earthquakes can consist of survival measures, preparation that will improve survival in the event of an earthquake, or mitigating measures, that seek to minimise the effect of an earthquake. Common survival measures include storing food and water for an emergency, and educating individuals what to do during an earthquake. Mitigating measures can include firmly securing large items of furniture, TV and computer screens that may otherwise fall over in an earthquake. Likewise, avoiding storing items above beds or sofas reduces the chance of objects falling on individuals.
Suck.com was an online magazine, one of the earliest ad-supported content sites on the Internet. It featured daily editorial content on a great variety of topics, including politics and pop-culture. Launched in 1995 and geared towards a Generation X audience, the website's motto was "A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun". Despite not publishing new content since 2001, the site remained online until December 2018.
Gaetano "Gay" Talese is an American writer. As a journalist for The New York Times and Esquire magazine during the 1960s, Talese helped to define contemporary literary journalism and is considered, along with Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson, one of the pioneers of New Journalism. Talese's most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.
Pearl "Polly" Adler was an American madam and author, best known for her work A House Is Not a Home, which was posthumously adapted into a film of the same name. In 2021, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Debby Applegate published a comprehensive account of Adler's life and times entitled Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age with Doubleday.
Amy Dickinson is an American newspaper columnist who writes the syndicated advice column Ask Amy. Dickinson has appeared as a social commentator on ABC's Good Morning America and NBC's The Today Show.
Cheryl Strayed is an American writer and podcast host. She has written four books: the novel Torch (2006) and the nonfiction books Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), Tiny Beautiful Things (2012) and Brave Enough (2015). Wild, the story of Strayed's 1995 hike up the Pacific Crest Trail, is an international bestseller and was adapted into the 2014 Academy Award-nominated film Wild.
Teaching (your) grandmother to suck eggs is an English language saying that refers to a person giving advice to another person in a subject with which the other person is already familiar.
Daniel M. Lavery is an American author and editor. He is known for having co-founded the website The Toast, and written the books Texts from Jane Eyre (2014), The Merry Spinster (2018), and Something That May Shock and Discredit You (2020). He wrote Slate's "Dear Prudence" advice column from 2016 to 2021. From 2022-2023, he hosted a podcast on Slate titled Big Mood, Little Mood. In 2017, he started a paid e-mail newsletter on Substack titled Shatner Chatner, renamed to The Chatner in 2021.
Kate Bolick is the author of New York Times bestseller Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own. She is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic, and host of "Touchstones at The Mount," an annual literary interview series at Edith Wharton’s country estate in the Berkshires.
Jolie Kerr is an American writer and podcast host. Her book, My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag...and Other Things You Can't Ask Martha, was a New York Times best-seller.
Isaac Asimov wrote three volumes of autobiography. In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980) were a two-volume work, covering his life up to 1978. The third volume, I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), published after his death, was not a sequel but a new work which covered his whole life. This third book won a Hugo Award.
The Good Son is a novel by You-Jeong Jeong, first published in South Korea in 2016 by Eunhaengnamu (ISBN 9788956609959). It was translated into English by Chi-Young Kim, with the translation published in 2018 by Little Brown Book Group. This is the first Novel by Jeong to have an official English translation; the author created three novels prior to this one. Hachette India published the book in English in that country.
Susan Ferrer Quimpo was a Filipino activist, author, theater artist, and art therapist best known for her advocacy work of educating the Filipino youth about the Philippines’ Martial Law era, and for co-writing the book “Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years.”
Stephanie Danler is an American author. Her debut novel, Sweetbitter (2016), was a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a television show by the same name. She released a memoir, Stray, in 2020.
John Paul Brammer is an American writer and artist. He writes the queer advice column ¡Hola Papi!, originally published in Grindr's magazine Into and subsequently via Substack, and is the author of the memoir: ¡Hola Papi! How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons. In 2021, he became an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.
Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage is a 2022 memoir by Heather Havrilesky.
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