"Graciously willing to play the fool" with Jessica Weisberg

We have our first female advice giver on the show and she happens to be an expert in the history of advice! Jessica Weisberg is the author of the book, "Asking for a Friend: Three Centuries of Advice on Life, Love, Money, and Other Burning Questions from a Nation Obsessed." We get into her book and then throw a pretty tough advice question her way about how to handle a friend with some dark secrets.
We have our first female advice giver on the show and she happens to be an expert in the history of advice! Jessica Weisberg is the author of the book, "Asking for a Friend: Three Centuries of Advice on Life, Love, Money, and Other Burning Questions from a Nation Obsessed." We get into her book and then throw a pretty tough advice question her way about how to handle a friend with some dark secrets.

Jessica Weisberg has worked as a producer on Serial, a supervising producer at Vice News Tonight on HBO, and an editor at Gimlet. Her work has been nominated for an Emmy and won an Edward Murrow Award.
 
Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atavist, and many other publications, and was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Public Interest Journalism in 2017. Her first book, Asking for a Friend, a history of famous American advice-givers, came out in 2018 was excerpted by The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and LitHub.

Jessica's latest piece for the New Yorker, "The Lost Boys of Galveston Texas"

Hey Man, 
The other day, I went to my friend’s office to meet up to go out for drinks at the end of the day. He ran off to the bathroom and while I was waiting, I noticed that he was logged into Reddit and was on a really misogynistic subreddit. I know my friend’s username on reddit since we share funny memes with each other and he was logged in under a different name that I didn’t recognize. Later that night, I looked up that username and was horrified by what I found. He comments on incredibly toxic subreddits and goes on to other communities to troll and harass users. I never would have guessed that this was my friend. I tried to talk to him about it but he denied knowing what I was talking about. Later that day, the account was deleted, although I still have screenshots. I don’t know what to do. I don’t think anyone else knows about this, not the rest of our friends and definitely not his girlfriend. Should I out my friend? Should I help him? How?

Signed, 
Grossed Out in Greenpoint

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2019 Hey Man Podcast