Advice With Slate's Dear Prudie (and Brian): Good Neighbors and Good Friends
The Brian Lehrer Show
WNYC
4.6 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 10 August 2023
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the first installment of a summer advice series, Jenée Desmond-Harris, writer and host of Slate's Dear Prudence podcast and column, and Brian offer advice to listeners struggling with a dilemma, and callers weigh in with their opinions.
First Letter:
Dear Prudence (and Brian): I live in a 'luxury' high rise condo in Brooklyn. A few of our neighbors are in the habit of storing various items in our common hallway, ranging from doormats to stacks of empty water cooler jugs to baby strollers. (including one 2 feet from my door) Beyond the fact that they’re unsightly, they represent a violation of NYC's fire code. Not wanting to offend people we see on a daily basis, we notified building management and they have sent a few email reminders to residents, but to no avail. Should I accept this as a fact of life in a building that is not a co-op and therefore lacks a share-holders’ board of rule enforcers or should I somehow escalate my concerns?
Second Letter:
Dear Prudence (and Brian): Michael, a friend of mine for over 35 years, is now 67 years old. A shift is taking place: Michael does not have personal conversations with me anymore, instead he speaks to me as if giving a lecture. Loud, forceful diatribes about politics, money, relationships…. He is the EXPERT on all things now. This tendency is relatively new, and I have witnessed this shift gradually over the last few years (especially about politics – and we are both progressive liberals). I want to be supportive of Paul, but I find myself getting sucked into his rants, and these turn into arguments between us, usually over obscure and meaningless facts. Some background: Each of us are now experiencing age-based health issues, along with family stuff like aging parents. I’ve witnessed that he goes on automatic overdrive ramping up any simple talk into an argument. And now I'm avoiding speaking with him about anything. How do I shift these conversations into meaningful personal and heartfelt talks about each of our lives, instead of these 'fact' arguments? We have had so many great supportive conversations over these many years, and I miss them. How do I kindly head off his rants at the pass?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the Bryan Lair Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. |
| 0:16.0 | Now we're going to do something we've never done before. |
| 0:20.2 | A new way to share advice on this show. Many of you know we do advice segments from time |
| 0:25.8 | we've done health advice of various kinds financial advice parenting advice. We sometimes |
| 0:31.2 | play a game we call advice roulette where callers chosen at random asked each other for advice. |
| 0:37.4 | But today something new that I hope will be fun and really interesting and helpful to some of |
| 0:42.0 | you. And some of you probably know that slate does this much better than we do. They have an |
| 0:48.0 | ongoing feature on their website and in a podcast called deer prudence. People write in their |
| 0:53.8 | advice questions and prudence who in real life is Janae Desmond Harris responds with advice |
| 1:00.7 | in her column on slate or on the deer prudence podcast. She's also a contributing writer for the |
| 1:05.5 | New York Times often on advice related topics. So this month Janae and I are teaming up three |
| 1:11.3 | Thursdays on this show and later this month I'll be on the deer prudence podcast with her as |
| 1:16.7 | Janae does usually invite a non expert partner long for the ride there. And on both our shows we'll |
| 1:22.8 | take a few of your dilemmas and see if we can be of some help. And this show being the calling show |
| 1:29.4 | that it is we're also going to invite you to weigh in on the two advice questions that we will try |
| 1:34.5 | to answer in this segment today. Hold your calls for now of course until you hear the question. |
| 1:39.7 | But please join me in welcoming deer prudence aka Janae Desmond Harris. Hi Janae I'm so excited |
| 1:46.7 | about this welcome to WNYC. Hi Brian thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited too and a |
| 1:52.4 | little nervous I've never done this live before. So you want to introduce yourself to the listeners |
| 1:58.1 | a little bit like I don't give advice for a living really but you do and I'll tell the listeners |
| 2:03.8 | that your background is mostly in journalism you've been an opinion page editor for the New York Times |
| 2:09.7 | and a writer on race and politics for Vox and I see you went to law school. So how do you end up |
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