Eric Shackle Writes: Another Well-Named Hack
Eric Shackle "discovers'' another famous American hack.
A few days ago we wrote that there really is a journalist named Hack: Winston Jefferson Hack, publisher of the pop magazine Dazed & Confused. Now, to our astonishment, we’ve discovered that America too has a hack journalist of a similar name - the Washington Post’s agony aunt is Carolyn Hax!
Carolyn is a writer and columnist and the author of the eponymous advice column Carolyn Hax — formerly titled Tell Me About It. The column first appeared in 1997 and is published on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, syndicated in more than 200 newspapers. It originally provided advice targeted at people under 30, but has in recent years broadened its age range, and features cartoons by Carolyn’s former husband, Nick Galifianakis.
She also takes part in a weekly web chat. Carolyn Hax Live, on the newspaper’s website,. Selected transcripts are later published.
Born on December 5, 1966, Carolyn grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut, the youngest of four daughters. (Her father, now retired, was director of research planning at Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford, Connecticut. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 1988.
She was associate editor and news editor at the Army Times and copy editor and news editor at the Washington Post. In 2001, she published her first book, Tell Me About It: Lying, Sulking and Getting Fat and 56 Other Things Not to Do While Looking for Love. Her essay "Peace and Carrots" was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families (ed. Leslie Morgan Steiner; Random House, 2006).
Some of her readers were critical when they learned that Carolyn was pregnant, with twins, when she married her second husband, childhood friend Ken Ackerman, in November 2002. (She and her first husband had divorced in late 2001). She responded in her weekly online chat, Carolyn Hax Live.
Her husband has publicly commented on their eight-year relationship as well, saying, "We were a great couple that could maybe be greater apart. The point of the column is not to keep people together; it's for people to be happy. And sometimes being happy means making that kind of adjustment, where maybe you're not together."[
Carolyn and her cartoonist husband continue to collaborate on the advice column. They have three chldren, and live in Washington, DC.
You can read Carolyn Hax’s popular column here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/carolyn-hax-a-sister-needs-to-speak-up-about-a-perceived-snub/2013/06/04/9fececea-c240-11e2-9fe2-6ee52d0eb7c1_story.html
And a London Daily Mail story about Jefferson Hack:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2207963/Kate-Mosss-ex-Jefferson-Hack-spotted-smooching-emerald-haired-fashionista-magazine-party-Milan.html
Previous story in Open Writing http://www.openwriting.com/archives/2013/06/no_hack_journal.php
