Topic: Judith Martin

Judith Martin (née Perlman, born September 13, 1938), better known by the pen name Miss Manners, is an American journalist, author, and etiquette authority. Martin's uncle was the distinguished economist and labor historian Selig Perlman.

Martin was born and spent a significant part of her childhood in Washington, D.C. where she still lives and works, graduating from Georgetown Day School. She lived in various foreign capitals as a child, as her father, a United Nations economist, was frequently transferred. She is a graduate of Wellesley College with a degree in English. Before she began the advice column, she was a journalist, covering social events at the White House and embassies; she then became a theater and film critic. Martin is known among Star Wars fans for her less-than-adulatory review of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, which she referred to as a "good junk movie" with "no plot structure, no character ... development, no ... original vision of the future".

Since 1978 she has written an advice column, which is distributed three times a week by United Features Syndicate and carried in more than 200 newspapers worldwide. In the column, she answers etiquette questions contributed by her readers and writes short essays on problems of manners, or clarifies the essential qualities of politeness.