Lea Carpenter
Recent Activity
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Editor's Note: Lea Carpenter writes the English Lessons column for Big Think about what we can learn from the writing we love. She interviewed former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens for Big Think, and wrote this post. Everyone knows “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for ... Read More
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It turns out that the phrase “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” did not originate with Gloria Steinem, but rather was inspired by another phrase: a man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle. U2 used the line well once, catching the additional irony of the idea when sung by a man. Yet ... Read More
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The military tends to talk in signs and numbers—and, perhaps most famously, in code. The use of abbreviations and alphabetical systems is efficient. In this week’s New Yorker , we learn a little bit more not only about what happened in the last hours of the bin Laden raid, but also about how the ... Read More
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Yesterday’s announcement that Robert F. Kennedy’s papers are being reviewed inspired us to revisit one of the former Attorney General’s finest speeches, one we have not written about here before. It was a speech given only three years following the assassination of RFK’s brother, and one given at ... Read More
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Ken Auletta’s profile of Sheryl Sandberg in The New Yorker is an excellent companion to Sandberg’s TED speech of last December. The latter was passed like a Dead bootleg among a certain group of women who had made a certain set of choices in their lives, perhaps not unlike the way Gwyneth Paltrow’s ... Read More
About 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.