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Heather Havrilesky

Heather Havrilesky is the author of the How to Be a Person in the World and the memoir Disaster Preparedness.

She writes New York Magazine’s weekly advice column “Ask Polly.” She wrote a cartoon called Filler for the web’s first daily publication, Suck.com, and she was the TV critic for Salon for seven years. She has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Bookforum, and NPR’s All Things Considered, along with many other publications and anthologies.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and a loud assortment of dependents, most of them nondeductible.

Delusion at the Gastropub

It takes a lot of high-capitalist pixie dust to turn the basics of subsistence into coveted luxuries. The brazen marketing of designer water at $5 per bottle, flown in from Fiji or the Alps—or better yet, filled from a local municipal tap—may have been the first red flag, ...
Gothard-Future-Havrilesky

Apocalypse Soon

In the developed West, the projection of firepower and technological prowess has become so forcefully identified with the idea of progress itself that it makes a straightforward sort of sense to imagineer the intellectual progenitors of the modern liberal state as a diorama full ...
Illustration by Laurie Rosenwald.

Play, Dammit!

The vigorous exhortation to “play” now haunts every corner of our culture. Typically issued as an imperative along with words like breathe and meditate and dance and celebrate, the word play, in its catchall generic form, has a curious way of repelling the senses, conjuring ...

Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism

While we are still recovering from the trauma that finance capital has inflicted on our public world, a late-capitalist fairy tale manages the pain in the more private and intimate reaches of the sexual daydream. In one version of the story, a wide-eyed mermaid cleverly ...

Sit-Cons

On television, money imbues characters with honor or shame, dignity or recklessness, charity or malevolence. While the black hat vs. white hat moral absolutism that once dominated the small screen has slowly dissolved into an ethically ambiguous world of pure-intentioned, ...