In May, 2005, The Believer launched Sedaratives, an advice column helmed by Amy Sedaris that soon featured a cast of guest advisers—writers, producers, actors, and comedians—who, every month, were given a selection of questions that ranged from the poignant to the, well, not:

My mother says that nobody has good manners anymore. This coming from a woman who fucked three strangers at Woodstock. Does her moral grandstanding carry any weight at all?

Is there a manly way in which to eat cotton candy? If so, I’d like to find out what it is.

I’m looking for a book that I can read on the subway and it’ll make all the other commuters look at me with envy, and possibly even think, “Good god, he must be so much smarter than the rest of us I bet he’s got his life together. I want to be his friend.” Any recommendations?

In the November 21, 2011, issue of the magazine, Lauren Collins wrote about Lucy Worsley, the chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, which runs the Tower of London, Kensington Palace, Hampton Court Palace, Kew Palace, and the Banqueting House at Whitehall. “In a land of ponderous dons who go by their initials, Dr. Lucy, a thirty-seven-year-old bluestocking with a barrette, has caused a sensation,” Collins wrote. “She is an unembarrassed disciple of a school of history known as experimental archeology—or as she calls it, ‘dressing up and trying things out’—which uses artifacts to channel the physical experience of everyday life in another era.” In the line of duty, Worsley has made a Victorian bed (it took half an hour), roasted all manner of animals, waded through nineteenth-century sewers, trained a dog to turn a roasting spit, and tested urine as a stain remover.

Worsley’s most recent project is the book/BBC television series “If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home,” which focusses on the four rooms—bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen—that lend to an understanding of both British history and the evolution of its culture. Worsley recently took the time to answer some questions on British homes and their histories; an edited version of the exchange appears at newyorker.com.

On March 11, 2010, an anonymous writer introduced herself as the new voice of “Dear Sugar,” an advice column on the Web site the Rumpus. Sugar claimed she would offer a combination of “the by-the-book common sense of Dear Abby and the earnest spiritual cheesiness of Cary Tennis and the butt-pluggy irreverence of Dan Savage and the closeted Upper East Side nymphomania of Miss Manners,” but soon proved to be something entirely her own: an advice columnist who spoke through frank personal experience, one whose responses went from advice to essay and back again. In The New Republic, Ruth Franklin called her “the ultimate advice columnist for the Internet age, remaking a genre that has existed, in more or less the same form, since well before Nathanael West’s acerbic novella ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ first put a face on the figure in 1933.”

Over the next two years, Sugar’s fans—a devoted readership that includes more than fifteen thousand Facebook and Twitter followers—learned bits about who she was. She was a she. She had lost her mother far too early. She had children, a husband, student-loan debt, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of open-minded, honest advice. Her responses covered jealousy, the decision to have (or not have) children, drug addiction, and the unanswerable questions of life. On Tuesday night, at a coming-out party in San Francisco, Sugar formally introduced herself as Cheryl Strayed, a writer living in Portland whose new memoir, “Wild,” will be the Rumpus Book Club’s pick for March. She recently took time to answer questions on anonymity, intimacy, and her relationship with her readers. An edited version of the exchange appears at newyorker.com.

In the August 13, 2007, issue of the magazine, Tom Mueller wrote about corruption in the olive-oil trade. By the late nineteen-nineties, olive oil—often cut with cheaper oils, such as hazelnut and sunflower seed—was the most adulterated agricultural product in the European Union. The E.U.’s anti-fraud office established an olive-oil task force, “yet fraud remains a major international problem,” Mueller wrote. “Olive oil is far more valuable than most other vegetable oils, but it is costly and time-consuming to produce—and surprisingly easy to doctor.”

Nearly five years later, fraud remains a problem. Mueller has expanded the scope of his article’s research with his recent book “Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil,” which focusses on the contamination of olive oil not only by seed oils but by the misuse of the label “extra virgin” on olive oils that don’t meet that designation’s standards. Mueller recently took the time to answer questions on olive oil and the risks involved in its trade; an edited version of the exchange appears at newyorker.com.