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Lea Carpenter
Lea Carpenter was a Founding Editor of Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine, Zoetrope. She graduated from Princeton and has an MBA from Harvard. Her Harvard University Commencement Address, “Auden and The Little Things,” was about the need for poetry in our lives. She lives in New York with her husband and son where she produces programming for the New York Public Library. She formerly wrote the Think, See, Feel blog for BigThink.
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Judith Thurman’s Talk of the Town piece in this week’s New Yorker details how an unknown Italian “journalist” fabricated interviews with Philip Roth and John Grisham (the odd selection of those […]
There is no easy answer as to why we keep sales humming for books many would profess are not worth their time. “Betrayal” Lit, as so-called by The Daily Beast‘s […]
Edmund White’s eloquent consideration of Cheever in the new New York Review of Books remembers the late author’s connections with Chekhov, his love/hate relationship with Catcher in the Rye, and […]
As Churchill said of democracy (“the worst form of government excepting those already tried,” to paraphrase), so historians might say of marriage—or at least, marriage as conceived in the late […]
News of a “liberal” price cut on the late William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Manhattan flat in today’s New York Times provides reason enough to remember the iconic author/editor’s brilliance. Who […]
News of new adulteries in Hollywood is not shocking. It is the opposite of shocking; it is confirmation. Yet what has been confirmed, exactly? The Daily Beast’s Nicole La Porte […]
It’s not all economics, with respect to (the aforementioned) Laureates Sen and Stiglitz. It can be as simple as finding daily rituals. Make the bed. Plant a garden. It’s a […]
Love. Sex. Space. Coke. (Coke?) Discretion. Indiscretion. Family. Fame. Privacy. Puppies. The Rolling Stones. One man’s happiness is, axiomatically, not another’s, and so the riddle of what brings us peace […]
Ferguson’s piece in the new Foreign Affairs, “Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos,” considers the question of how history moves, and whether the conventional assumptions concerning, as […]
Barbra Streisand said it: “The time has come.” Watching Bigelow ascend the stage was meaningful for many people for many reasons, but meaningful for all women for one: it can […]
While most of the world waits to hear who will take home which Oscars, some of us might be as content to watch playwright Martin McDonagh ascend a separate stage, […]
Jason Epstein thought of Amazon before Jeff Bezos. Or at least, he understood the concept: the necessity, and power, of making the world’s backlist available at all times. Epstein’s uniquely […]
Randy Kennedy’s “The Free-Appropriation Writer,” in today’s New York Times Week in Review, considers the ever-sensitive spectrum of borrowing (said another way, flattery; said another way, plagiarism) that has historically […]
Vanity Fair’sPresidential Profiles, edited by Graydon Carter, is a jewel. Or, a jewel-box: a tiny, elegantly conceived, and ruthlessly crafted jewel-box of a book. It will make you wish you’d […]
In his piece in this week’s New Yorker on depression, and depression-related research, Louis Menand asks, “Is psychopharmacology evil, or is it useless?” Increasingly, skeptics say it’s the latter, and […]
Tiger’s statement recalled the words of Saint Augustine, who said, “Make me chaste—but not yet.” There is something about society’s axiomatic forgiveness in the face of apology (especially when religion […]
N+1 editor Charles Petersen’s piece in the new New York Review of Books compares Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to legendary city planner Robert Moses. Do we agree? Can we concede […]
While it’s not quite Norman Mailer on Liston v. Patterson, Gawker’s analysis of New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier’s recent exchange with Andrew Sullivan makes for brilliant reading, a smart companion to the […]
The rest simply cannot be controlled. Yet apropos of Valentine’s Day, it’s worth considering something The Daily Beast reported recently, a remark made by philanthropist (and Edwards supporter) Bunny Mellon regarding John […]
It turns out they knew exactly what they were doing. The Grateful Dead became the most successful band of all time not by making their work scarce, but by making […]