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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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Amy Davidson’s post about the WikiLeaks Guantanamo release is an excellent example of writing short, with feeling—and meaning. One reason so many of the New Yorker blogs work well with […]
There is so much beautiful writing about war. One of the first, best stories of a soldier (and his return home) is Homer’s The Odyssey. It captures –metaphorically, and at […]
English Lessons is a new blog celebrating writing we love, and illuminating why we love it—and what we can learn from it. Poetry, fiction, editorials; Presidential speeches, classic texts, popular […]
Looking at the language of critical response to the novel, there are parallels. This is not to say that David Foster Wallace cared for Hamlet. But he seemed to care […]
We didn’t mind Maureen Dowd’s dismantling of (whatever remains of) the mythologizing of Dylan as a hero for/of protest. There was a moment in time when Dylan was hero for […]
This is Twilight, for poets. It’s not designed to fly over your head; it’s designed as to shoot straight to your heart.
John Jeremiah Sullivan has written a beautiful, beautiful piece about David Foster Wallace in GQ. It isn’t easy to write about Wallace; how Sullivan chooses to do it is illuminating. […]
Hertzberg wrote one of the simplest, and most elegant, blog posts (this form truly needs a new descriptive terminology) in response to President Obama’s speech on Libya. It was concise. […]
Orr’s piece in the New York Times Book Reviewon an O magazine photo shoot with young poets is a perfect example of how to write about something you know a […]
Janet Malcolm is a careful writer. The new Paris Review has an interview with her. The Review still publishes the best interviews on code-cracking the art of writing. This exchange—which […]
Thinking about revolutions is inextricable from thinking about grief. We cannot know how many lives will be lost, but we know that those left behind will engage in personal and […]
While reading about the relationship between Thomas Aquinas and insider trading allegations, it occurred to us that the evolution of thinking about any classic crime has an almost-classic arc: deplore; […]
Between the WikiLeaks scandal and the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, Frederick Siedel's "Our Gods" is the perfect poem for our times.
Amidst the radical change in the Middle East, JFK's first inaugural address remains a prescient reminder that our nation is founded upon the ideals of revolution and social progress.
Joyce Carol Oates has written a beautiful book about grief following the loss of a spouse. As Oates is one of the most prolific American writers much has been written […]
It was an elegant accident of editorial timing: two major articles on post-traumatic stress (and the attendant increase in prescription pill use among members of our military), and a beautiful, […]
If you only read one piece about Scientology, make it Lawrence Wright’s in this week’s New Yorker. Wright’s book The Looming Towertold the story of how we arrived at 9/11, […]
Now we are hearing about the memoir. Now, just as we stand shocked and awed before another chaotic call for revolutionary change in leadership, a moment some have claimed confirm […]
“The future of search is verbs.” This is what Bill Gates told Esther Dyson over dinner, and what Esther Dyson told us at Big Think’s Google v. Bing/Farsight 2011: Beyond […]
The Tiger Mom went to Davos; of course she did. And what did she say? And why do we care? Has her Battle Hymn hit a tipping point, and will […]