Dear Amy,

What rock did you crawl out from under? How did you end up with an advice column, anyway?

—Bet I Could Do Better

I’m originally from the Midwest, from Michigan. And when I was 10, I saw this Jill Clements photo in American Girl magazine of this really stylish girl in a plaid skirt striding across a street in New York. And from that moment on, all I wanted to do was get there. I wrote for my high school newspaper, won some awards and went to University of Michigan for three years and couldn’t stand it a moment longer and bolted, went to New York, because I had a scholarship for something I wrote. And so I graduated from NYU, and then went looking for a job.

I made films in my year at NYU and I used one to get a job at an ad agency, Ogilvy- Mather, where I had these two wacky friends and we had this idea that we would set up a Free Advice booth on West Broadway and Broome, which are two streets in SoHo. We didn’t even want to charge five cents because we thought, “Who’d pay us, even a nickel?” So I made this sign: FREE ADVICE FROM A PANEL OF EXPERTS and we got chairs from a thrift store and a magazine rack and a table and set them out on a street corner, thinking that people would walk by and laugh. Well, it’s New York and the sign said “Free,” so they lined up around the block!

Now, I had not even taken a psychology course in college but all these people started asking questions, and some were like “What should I do with my hair?” but sometimes it was more of a psychological thing. And so I started mowing through all of psychology. Jung! Freud! Fritz Perls! Gestalt therapy! And I found that a lot of the stuff that people really hold dear, like Freud, I thought was a crock. Then I discovered Albert Ellis, who started what’s now called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. His particular approach is called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and it’s based on the ideas of [ancient Greek philosopher] Epictetus, who basically said it is not events that disturb us but the views we take of them. Meaning, you’re disturbed because you’re thinking irrationally and Ellis would help you change, rather rapidly, by applying reason to your problems.

Now, I had no illusions that I could have any kind of career out of this free advice thing, I was just a wacky broad, as my boyfriend would say. So we’re doing this for five years and then this guy from the New York Times writes a story for the Style section about us - and, like, all hell breaks loose. Soon we’ve got a lawyer, an agent, a book deal and a column in the New York Daily News. One of my partners died, unfortunately, and the other one quit, so I ended up doing the column in the Daily News by myself, and since it was very popular in the features section, I wanted to be in more papers so I thought, “I know, I’ll get syndicated.” So I went to these syndicates and they all said “Nah, Ann Landers and Dear Abby have all the real estate in papers, you’ll never make any money.” And I thought, like, “Screw you.” And I’ve always read alternative weeklies, wherever I went, they were my favorite papers, the papers that spoke most to me. So I took some samples of my column and went to the conference for alternative weeklies that year and got into 70 papers by myself! Then the syndicates were like, “Hi! Hello! Let me court you!” and so that’s sort of how it happened.

By this time I was reading all these evolutionary psychology books like The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and a lot of what I do in my column is translate what’s basically ivory tower research, stuff an ordinary person would never see or read about, and put it out in my column in a way that makes a difference in ordinary people’s lives. It’s not just the opinion of the lady next door: my opinions are based in science. If I have a religion, it’s that. Where is the evidence? Look for the evidence. Is there evidence? Is there enough evidence? What are the limitations?

But nobody needs to know that when I write my day-to-day column. When I was in my 20s, I liked to use big words to impress people with my vocabulary, but now I’m happiest if I write, like, at a seventh-grade level, ’cause I want to communicate. And make people laugh.

Dear Amy,

You wrote a book about trying to stop people from being rude? Who do you think you are, Miss Manners?

—Politenessman

It’s funny that people call it “common courtesy” because I find that courtesy is becoming less and less common. And actually, I figured out why people are rude, based on the work of a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar, who measured the human neocortex and figured out that it seems humans have a maximum group size of 150. That’s where you know them and they know you and you owe them and they owe you. And based on his work, I decided that we’re rude because we live in societies too big for our brains. We did not evolve to be around strangers, we basically have Stone Age Brains. Since we’re not used to being around strangers, we don’t really have it in us to tell the strangers, “would you mind putting a sock in it” when they’re shouting in their cellphone at the drugstore. You just want to think your thoughts. At one point in the book, I ask someone, “Why do you think our attention belongs to you?” The point I want to make is that people who are rude are actually stealing from us but we don’t see it that way. If somebody takes your wallet, it’s there and then it’s gone, it’s a tangible thing that has disappeared from your life. But what people who are rude are doing is stealing your time, your peace of mind, your good night’s sleep. And so we need to see that as theft just as we do with a stolen wallet and tell these people, “Hey, you can’t victimize me.”

There was an episode in the café where I wrote my book. This woman sits down behind me at 8 o’clock in the morning and starts belting out her call like six inches from my head.

And they actually have a No Cell Phone policy in this place so I mention it to her and she’s like “You’re interrupting my call.” Uhhh, you’re interrupting my life. And so I made this comment to her, “You know, my time is very valuable to me and you took 30 seconds of my attention.” She said, “Fine, I’ll give you a dollar.” Well, I was dressed kind of nicely, so I think she thought I’d turn down her offer of filthy lucre, but I said “Cool! Because if you pay me, you’re not abusing me, you’re employing me. Hey, 120 dollars an hour isn’t a bad rate, I’ll go for that.”

There are two ways to deal with this kind of rudeness. I’m what’s called a “costly punisher,” which is a term from economics, and it means, basically, you have a strong sense of justice and when you come upon injustice you take steps against it at cost to yourself and at no benefit. So if I ask somebody to pipe down at a café they could shout at me or punch me in the nose or shoot me. I’m not gonna win the lottery because I confront them. But most people just feel really uncomfortable saying anything and I understand that. Another thing that we can do is make an effort to treat strangers like neighbors. Do small kindnesses for people. For instance, I always have the newspaper, I read it every day, and some-

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