Ask emily yoffe biography

Welcome back to The Prophets, our Saturday series about fascinating people from the past who foresaw our current moment. Last week, Joe Nocera featured epidemiologist D.A. Henderson, who predicted years before Covid that a public health disaster would result from harsh lockdown policies. Today, Emily Yoffe writes about Mary Ware Dennett, a woman born in 1872 who fought a government ban that has far-reaching consequences for women’s future reproductive rights.

Mary Ware Dennett was an innovative suffrage organizer, and a pioneering birth control advocate and sex educator. She fought for legal autonomy for women and for the sexual fulfillment of all. Born in the Victorian era, she died in the Atomic Age, and although she is almost unknown today, she helped modernize American attitudes about our right to knowledge and medical care for the most intimate parts of life. 

At the end of her career, she was also convicted by the federal government for the criminal act of sending “obscene” material through the mail in a case that became a legal landmark.

During her years fighting

Your Infinite Capacity to Amaze Me

Slate’s Dear Prudence chat series is coming home. Emily Yoffe recently explained that she would be moving her weekly live chats from the Washington Post website to Slate.

On June 3, Slate Plus members joined Emily for a test run of Slate’s live-chat technology. What follows is an edited transcript of that AMA discussion. Starting this Tuesday at noon, we invite you to join Emily on Slate for her weekly live chat. Submit your questions here. –Lowen Liu, Slate copy chief and Dear Prudence editor.

Emily Yoffe: Good afternoon! Welcome to this Ask Me Anything. Thank you for helping us out to see how our new live-chat technology is working. We are bringing the chat I’ve done at the Washington Post over to Slate, so please bear with us while we work out some technical glitches.

Q.Respond Privately? Hi Emily! Do you ever respond offline to letters that don’t make the cut for Dear Prudence?

A: Shhh, but sometimes I do. It’s relatively random, but I try to respond to young people in distress. I often answer pe

Dear Prudence (advice column)

Column in Slate magazine

Dear Prudence is an advice column appearing several times weekly in the online magazine Slate and syndicated to over 200 newspapers.

History

Herbert Stein

The column was initiated on 20 December 1997. "Prudence" was a pseudonym, and the author's true identity was not revealed at the time. Slate's archive currently indicates that the author of those first columns was Herbert Stein. Stein ceased writing the column after three months and the column went on hiatus.

Margo Howard

In mid-March 1998, the column returned, with the explanation that "Prudence" had not come back from her "needlework"—per the explanation offered in Stein's last column—but rather had convinced her daughter and namesake to continue her work. While similarly anonymous at first, the new author of the column was eventually revealed to be Margo Howard,[1] the daughter of Esther Lederer, a.k.a. Ann Landers.

Howard maintained the column for nearly eight years. Her last Dear Prudence column appeared in Slate

Copyright ©boottry.pages.dev 2025