Dear Ann Landers: Advise Your Successors

Who’ll advise the advice columnists? Margo Howard—daughter of Ann Landers—wrote a nasty open letter yesterday to Amy Dickinson of the Chicago Tribune, accusing Dickinson of trying to usurp her mom's name. “Well, you are not the ‘new’ Ann Landers because there is no ‘new’ Ann Landers,” she says. Dickinson, for the record, says she has no interest in such a mantle and, in fact, cringes at the suggestion, writes Jack Shafer in Slate.

Shafer doesn't read either one of them, but he points out that Howard knows full well that her mom, Eppie Lederer, was actually the second to use the Ann Landers pen name. So she was the "new" Ann Landers. “I have no advice columnist in this fight,” writes Shafer. But if we’re going to get fussy about who gets to claim the Landers' name, let’s get it right.
(More advice columnist stories.)