Weisberg’s subjects are columnists, self-help magnates, life coaches, and kind retirees with an internet connection, from Benjamin Franklin to Ann Landers to a prolific Quora contributor named Michael King. They represent a range of attitudes and approaches, and an eclectic, though limited range of experiences: “aside from Oprah, who politely declined to be interviewed for this book, mass-market life advice is still largely dispensed by white people,” Weisberg writes, and with a few exceptions, the marquee advice-givers featured are straight, cisgender, and were born in the US. Beyond that, what they have in common is the fact that, through selling millions of books and being syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, they’ve “become the arbitrary authors of social rules, helping readers decide what is required of them.”
Not all of them have any expertise, much less in the fields they advise on, but their work, Weisberg argues, offers a uniquely direct window onto American emotional needs throughout the country’s history. Starting with the Athenian Mercury—a London publication that invited readers to submit anonymous questions to a secret society of experts (consisting, in fact, of the publisher, two of his brothers-in-law, and a guy who was maybe a doctor)—anonymity has been a technology of sorts that allows for a public record of what people actually care about.
Advice givers, Weisberg writes, serve an important social function: some give advice that passes into collective wisdom, on childcare (Dr. Benjamin Spock) or personal finance (Sylvia Porter). Even when their content amounts to fluff, they offer empathy and reassurance, if not necessarily broader solutions for the problems their readers consult them with. Though blockbuster advice-givers have exerted a huge amount of influence in shaping the attitudes and opinions of audiences, the practice itself, as Weisberg notes, seems inherently conservative. There’s a perception that helping individuals and helping society are contradictory goals: “Advice, stereotypically, is meant for the individual seeking a competitive advantage in business or love.” But matters of how people treat one another are linked, of course, to deeper moral and political dynamics. Advice givers, at their best, can attempt to fold together the micro and macro—helping readers pay meaningful attention to other people, and distilling issues that can seem abstract, or like matters of opinion, to matters of human dignity.