Dear Prudence (advice column)

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

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. In mid-March of 1998, the column returned, with the explanation that "Prudence" had not come back from her "needlework," as 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, the daughter of Esther Lederer, aka Ann Landers.

Howard maintained the column for nearly eight years. Her last Dear Prudence column appeared in Slate on 2 February 2006. Howard now has a Creators Syndicate advice column called "Dear Margo," and "Dear Prudence" has been taken over by Slate staffer Emily Yoffe. Since the summer of 2007, when Slate video magazine Slate V was launched, Yoffe also appears in short, video taped Dear Prudence clips, illustrated with animations.

The title of the column is a reference to the Beatles song, "Dear Prudence."