Daniel Mallory Ortberg

Daniel M. Lavery is an American author and editor. He is known for having co-founded the website The Toast and written the books Texts from Jane Eyre (2014), The Merry Spinster (2018), and Something That May Shock and Discredit You (2020). He wrote Slate's "Dear Prudence" advice column from 2016 to 2021. As of 2022, he hosts a podcast on Slate titled Big Mood, Little Mood. In 2017, he started a paid e-mail newsletter on Substack titled Shatner Chatner, renamed to The Chatner in 2021.

Born Mallory Ortberg, Lavery grew up in northern Illinois and then San Francisco, one of three children of the evangelical Christian author and former Menlo Church pastor John Ortberg and Nancy Ortberg, who is also a pastor and the CEO of Transforming the Bay with Christ. He attended Azusa Pacific University, a private, evangelical Christian university in California. While a student, Lavery appeared on Jeopardy!, Show #5816 of Monday, December 21, 2009, and finished in third place.

Lavery has credited the work of Shirley Jackson and her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, particularly John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, as influential. Lavery wrote for Gawker and The Hairpin. Through this work, he met Nicole Cliffe, with whom he operated The Toast, a feminist general interest website, from July 2013 to July 2016.

He was included in the 2015 Forbes "30 under 30" list in the media category. On November 9, 2015, Slate announced he would take over the magazine's "Dear Prudence" advice column from Emily Yoffe. He stopped writing the column in May 2021. In 2017, he launched Shatner Chatner, a paid e-mail newsletter on Substack. On May 19, 2021, Lavery accepted a Substack Pro deal and shortened the newsletter's name to The Chatner.

Lavery's first book, Texts from Jane Eyre, was released in November 2014 and became a New York Times bestseller. The book was based on a column he wrote first at The Hairpin, then continued at The Toast, which imagines well-known literary characters exchanging text messages. 

The premise was inspired by a comments section thread on a piece Cliffe had written for The Awl; on Cliffe's review of Gone With the Wind, a commenter wrote that their experience in the South was nearly identical to the novel "except everybody has cellphones." This prompted him to imagine how Scarlett O'Hara might have used a cell phone.