Danny Lavery here, please don't be alarmed if you don't hear that familiar theme music that

normally opens this podcast. We've changed the music and the name of the show as well.

You are listening to Big Mood, Little Mood, with Danny Lavery. But if you are a regular listener

of Dear Prudence, I still think you'll feel at home here. We'll still be answering a few

questions from advice seekers at the top of every show, so you won't be left adrift.

Hello and welcome for the first time to the show Big Mood, Little Mood, with Danny Lavery. This is

no longer the Dear Prudence podcast. There will be more prudences to come. The tree that

produces the Dear Prudence pods is almost fully ripe and is close to dropping a new one soon.

But my time as an advice columnist formally has come to an end. But I am luckily enough able to

continue doing this show here at Slate, with only a slightly modified format. So from now on,

you can expect some advice still to come. So people who have enjoyed the show for the advice format

will not have to despair. I will still be having guests in the studio. I will still be Daniel

M. Lavery. I'm done changing my name. I'm pretty sure. I'm just going to change the name of the

podcast, but I'm going to keep my name as is. And we'll spend a while answering a few questions.

And then we'll spend a little more time talking about what we understand to be sort of overarching

themes of the questions that we have tackled. There are so often on the old show, I felt like I could

have dedicated an entire episode simply to, you know, what do you do with the question? Am I over

reacting? Or how many different ways can I say you might want to stop talking to your mother?

Kind of endless ways to say that one. Actually, I don't know that I'll ever run out of ways.

And I'm really, really looking forward to getting the chance to try out this new format with my

guest today, who is someone whose work I very, very much admire. Aubrey Gordon is a columnist for

self magazine and the author of what we don't talk about when we talk about fat. She also co-hosts

...