How much mail do you get? How do you manage it all? Do you ever send private responses, even when you don’t publish a letter?

Jennifer/CaptainAwkward: My current backlog is at least 7500+ emails from the last three years that have not become blog posts. I post 10-12 times/month, to give you an idea of proportion. I do sometimes send private responses, but I don’t wanna say that I do or that I will because I don’t want to create the expectation that every single email will be answered or even read. It’s a lot. I can’t wait to see if someone has good strategies for managing their mail. I am a magpie — “ooh, shiny!” — and that’s what gets answered.

Daniel/Dear Prudence: Oh, gosh. Probably between 40-60 questions a week through the live chat (and that’s filtered/winnowed down by Slate first). Maybe another hundred or two a week through the inbox. Voicemails, too, probably at least a few a week. I almost never send private responses, because if I start doing that, I won’t know when or where to draw the line, and I have other jobs I need to focus on during the week. The good thing about stepping into a pre-existing column is that there were already rules in place — 14 questions for the live chat plus a few live responses, one bonus question for Facebook and another for Slate plus, six questions for the column plus a bonus back-and-forth with Nicole Cliffe for Slate Plus, roughly 5-8 questions per podcast. It’s a fairly efficient system.

Harris/Dr. NerdLove: I have an absurd backlog spread over both my site and the letters I get for my column at Kotaku, and that’s not counting the people who try to jump the queue by DMing me on Facebook or Instagram. And to be perfectly blunt, a lot of them are variations of questions I’ve answered over and over again and my readers can usually predict what I’d say to them with distressing levels of accuracy.



I try to keep things manageable by sorting them into “Will definitely answer” vs. “Maybe” folders.

Jolie/Ask a Clean Person: I'm really diligent about managing my inbox — I read every question when it comes in and immediately file it into my main AaCP folder and, if applicable, into one of the subfolders I have (cars, pets, kids, LAMOB, Braugust, Laundry School, etc.) I try to flag the really good ones but more often than not I just remember they're there and when I'm ready to do a column or podcast episode on a certain topic I'll be like, "Oh yes, go find that Q about the drilldo, that was a fun one!"

Harris/Dr. NerdLove: Ooh, I like the idea of sorting questions into subfolders by topic! I need to figure out a system for that.

Jennifer/CaptainAwkward: I even have the folders with categories that a friend created, with great titles like “Can’t Fix Someone Else” or “Roommates” or “Low Intensity,” but the volume is so high I haven’t been good at using them. I need an assistant.

Alison/Ask a Manager: I have a horrible mail backlog. I get about 60+ questions a day, and I try to at least skim everything new once a day. But I need a better system. I have letters that sit for months before I answer them, and others that I answer the very next day just because the question sparked something for me.

Nicole/Care and Feeding: NOT NEARLY ENOUGH. I have to steal from the Prudie mailbag! I have also made up two questions from whole cloth. Please send me your questions! careandfeeding@slate.com. I beg you.

Jennifer/CaptainAwkward: @Nicole: NOTED.

Are there questions you won’t answer or topics you won’t address? If so, what makes something off-limits for you?

Jennifer/CaptainAwkward: This is heartbreaking to contemplate, because the mental health and crisis safety net is so very fragile and thin, but I have to sometimes remind people that I am not a crisis hotline. I’m just a lady, and I can’t, like, process your rape with you, or help you get out of your house now if you’re being abused, or talk you through your suicidal episode. I’m not the best person to help you, and also, for my own mental health, I can’t even take that on as a thing I can do. The people writing in are so vulnerable and they definitely deserve all the help in the world! But I’m not set up to give it. On a lighter note, I don’t care if single straight men ever get laid again in this life. Read books by women. Make the world safer for women. Go ask Dr. Nerdlove. Figure it out. Don’t ask me. You will not like my answer.

Daniel/Dear Prudence: The volume of questions the Dear Prudence inbox gets is such that I couldn’t possibly answer even half of what I get in a week. It’s been around for a pretty long time, and Slate has a pretty big readership, so I’m not really thinking in terms of “What do I want to turn down?” when it comes to the column/live chat/podcast. I tend not to answer questions along the lines of “How do I tell my partner that I want them to lose weight?” But even that’s not a hard and fast rule, if I think the LW could benefit from reconsidering some of the premises of that question.

Harris/Dr. NerdLove: I’m not going to justify people’s rage at women for not wanting to date them or validate their decision to do something self-destructive or “get back at” someone who theoretically wronged them. I’m always willing to apply the Chair Leg of Truth if a person wants blunt advice as to just where and how they screwed up, but I’m not here to be the guy telling you that you it’s OK to scream at someone who ghosted you, cheated on you or dumped you. It sucks that that happened, my dude, but you’re better off to take the time to heal and move on, not look for ways to get retribution

Jolie/Ask a Clean Person: I tend to avoid questions that veer more into etiquette/personal relationship territory, like "How do I get my husband to pick up his dirty underpants?" because I don't know your husband and I have no idea what kind of prompting will actually move him to get him to pick up his dirty underpants. Ditto for questions about roommates. I can tell you how to wash dishes, but I don't have much by way of advice for making someone do something they clearly don't want to do or don't think they should have to do.

Nicole/Care and Feeding: The hardest ones for me is when people are in just horrible crisis, hemmed in by financial strictures, and the answer really needs to be “the world is terrible, I’m so sorry.” Those questions I don’t want to turn into entertainment, and those are people I fold into my prayers at night and try to help offline, and it’s something I sense a lot of us in this job carry in our hearts. The people for whom advice can do nothing.

Alison/Ask a Manager: I get an uncomfortable number of office bathroom questions, stuff that makes me really squeamish. I have a quota on how many I’ll answer a year. I also tend to avoid answering the ones from parents writing in to try to get advice for their adult children. I don’t know that the kid even wants the advice.

Nicole/Care and Feeding: I absolutely struggle with the question of trauma. Sometimes there is no way for the letter writer to solve the problem, because the problem is not theirs and they do not have the ability to leave their situation. These are the people I often answer privately.

Jolie/Ask a Clean Person: Alison, you can send those bathroom Qs to me. I'm happy to take them! It could be like an advice columnist foreign exchange program…

Alison/Ask a Manager: It’s on. You’re going to regret this.

If someone wants to write to an advice columnist, are there tips that would help them increase their chances of getting a response (and a useful response)?

Jennifer/CaptainAwkward: Write a meaningful, descriptive email subject line. I have thousands of emails with the subject line “Question” or “Question for Captain Awkward” that all surely contain important, interesting questions, but when one says “Help me with emotional baggage that is packed in literal boxes” my eye goes right there. Also, learn to love the line break.

Alison/Ask a Manager: OMG yes, the subject lines. 90% of my inbox has the subject line “Question.”

Jolie/Ask a Clean Person: Wow I almost NEVER get subject line “Question!” That's too funny, I never really thought about how lucky I am that the queries I get tend to have really descriptive subject lines (a few samples from the past month: "Khakis and Steering Wheels" "Stinking feet sleeping bag" "Red wine puke" "More bleach, new washer, or fleeing the country?")

The questions that I'm most likely to use in columns or on my show provide detail about the mess in need of cleaning as well as the backstory on how the mess came to be. The human touch — the story behind the mess — is important to me and it's what, I think, makes Ask a Clean Person so good. You can find advice on how to clean up red wine puke in a lot of places, but it's not as easy to find advice columns where people are like, "So hey my boyfriend dumped me and I drank a bottle of red wine while cursing his name and burning his belongings then I puked, how do you get red wine barf out of a white carpet?"

Harris/Dr. NerdLove: Paragraph breaks. Paragraph breaks, paragraph breaks, paragraph breaks. If my eyes go crossed trying to read a letter, I’m probably going to skip it and pick a different one.

Jennifer/CaptainAwkward: “Ever since I was a child…” + 5000 more words linking childhood patterns to present-day workplace conflicts = Please go to therapy, bebe. That is what therapy is for. <3

Harris/Dr. NerdLove: If a columnist has a preferred way to be contacted, please follow that preference. Sending questions to my professional Facebook page (or on occasion my personal one) or other social media accounts isn’t going to get you to the top of the queue.



Also, I’m not sure if anyone else gets this but putting “please don’t answer this publicly/on your site” in the email tends to mean that the question isn’t going to get answered.

Nicole/Care and Feeding: Don’t leave out vital information just because you know it will make you look bad. If you say “my husband and I had a huge fight, things were said, there was an incident, and now I cannot be left alone with our child, how do I pursue legal remedies?” I NEED TO KNOW WHAT THE INCIDENT WAS.

For people who aren't Alison, do you frequently get updates from LWs?

Harris/Dr. NerdLove: I do on occasion, but never as often as I’d like, especially from folks who’ve written in because they’re in toxic or abusive relationships. But I love, love, love, hearing back from folks and getting updates on how they’re doing.

Jennifer/CaptainAwkward: Yes! I don’t ask for them, I never want people to feel obligated, but I do love getting them.

Jolie/Ask a Clean Person: A lot of people give me updates on Twitter about what cleaning products or techniques worked for them, which is so great and very, very helpful for me. Like, they'll ask a question, try what I've suggested and get back to me if it worked or if it didn't work. I generally sign off tweets in which I'm making suggestions by saying "let me know if that works, if not holler and we'll try something else" which I think encourages people to follow up with me.

Daniel/Dear Prudence: Sometimes! Generally speaking, the people who write in with updates have good news, or at least good news in the sense of “We ended up having to break up, but now I can see it was for the best.”

Nicole/Care and Feeding: Only once or twice. I assume I’ll hear more when the kids grow up and are either serial killers due to my advice or Supreme Court Justices, or both.

What question/LWs do you still think and wonder about a lot?

Harris/Dr. NerdLove: The ones that stick with me tend to be the people on the edge of hopelessness. They’re about to make a bad decision or they feel like they’re stuck in an awful place with no way out. Those are the ones that I want to hear back from the most.

Daniel/Dear Prudence: The people who have written to me about killing their neighbor’s dogs and are now wondering if they should admit to having done so. I often wonder if they actually do it, and if so what happens next. There have only been a few, I have not heard from many people who have killed their neighbors’ pets. But they stick with you!

Harris/Dr. NerdLove: That’s the sort of question that would put “ethics of contacting the police” at the top of my Google search list.

Jolie/Ask a Clean Person: [RAPID BLINKING] DANNY WHAT NOW? You're going to have to tell us a lot more about people writing to you about killing their neighbor's dogs. Under what circumstances are these killings happening?!? Also: I am very glad no one has ever written to me about killing their neighbor's dog, because I would not at all want to be complicit in the cleanup of such an act. (Though: I could help. I WOULD NOT HOWEVER. Team Doggers.)

Jennifer/CaptainAwkward: La la la I’m going to pretend I didn’t read that about the dogs.

Alison/Ask a Manager: I think about some of the weirder letters I’ve gotten. I still wonder what happened to the people whose boss was demanding they sign up to donate part of their liver to his brother. And I also worry about people who are in really bad work situations; I had a letter from someone who was being constantly verbally abused by a coworker, and her company knew and just didn’t care. I want her to get out of there and I hope she has.



Nicole/Care and Feeding: I desperately want to know what happened with this woman who worried her grandsons would stop loving her if they found out she had given a child up for adoption in the Baby Scoop era. She was so wounded and guilty and I wanted to help her so badly.

Also, I NEED to know how this lady cost her 2-year-old granddaughter not one, but two fingers, and will not sleep until I find out.