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.
Caitlin Flanagan’s essay, Love Actually, in the new Atlantic, reminds us why mothers and daughters find adolescence uniquely challenging. A girl becomes a woman, and yet her relationship to that […]
The New York Times has introduced a new blog, on philosophy. It’s called Stone. The first piece/post is written by the very elegant and, philosophically, compelling Simon Critchley, and addresses […]
The relationship between literary talent and literary fame is not so interesting to discuss (being so much discussed, and yet being uniquely subjective). Why should we care if the writers […]
David Brooks’s meditation on “dual-conscious” thinking in yesterday’s Times is an excellent piece leading into Mother’s Day tomorrow. Mothers are natural dual-thinkers; it is a mother’s work, perhaps uniquely, to […]
This remarkable video was made by the new Dean of the Harvard Business School, Nitin Nohria. It is Professor Nohria’s equivalent, in a way, of will.i.am’s Yes, We Can, the […]
We love our American President for his gift with words, and we learn from him in how he uses them—in articulating war, in assailing Wall Street, or even in making […]
What is the future role of the world’s great libraries, and librarians? Harvard Magazine considers what will become of one University’s vast collections in the age of digitization, and finds […]
The members of the Senate Permnanent Subommittee on Investigations were angry. Their anger was predictably performative, and often nasty. McCaskill’s analogy of Goldman Sachs to a bookie managing bets on […]
“The Goldman Emails,” exchanges between executives regarding the state of the market—and Goldman’s strategic choices leading up to and during this last crisis—are artful in their absence of art. These […]
The New York Times Magazine’s feature piece on Washington journalist Mike Allen makes him out to be the friend we all want: uniquely concerned, uniquely connected, possessing all the knowledge […]
Milan Kundera wrote that “we can never really know what to want because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives, nor perfect it in […]
This week’s New Yorker contains extraordinary, and extremely moving, letters written by Saul Bellow to other novelists. Bellow was, for many critics and readers, primus inter pares in American twentieth […]
We love Ian McEwan. We also love when esteemed literary publications surprise us with criticism of a writer so adored. Indeed, whatever one thinks of Solar, the new McEwan novel, […]
In a recent issue of British tabloid Grazia, the now celebrated (and still anonymous) “Oxbridge Sex Blogger” has a chance to explain her motives. She claims she’s simply attempting to […]
News of Norman Mailer via his widow’s memoir makes us want to remember all the things he wrote—and said. Like this: “A novel, at its best, really is an imaginary […]
David Brooks’s New York Times column today—on humility in leadership—plays an elegant, if not uncommon, trick via the inversion of a simple pronoun. Once he starts to describe the “humble […]
Finally, someone has taken the (necessary) contrarian view: Tiger’s nothing new. Furthermore, his public “shaming” and highly planned apologies are products, like tennis shoes–ones we might consider feeling shame ourselves […]
David Remnick appeared on Meet the Press yesterdayto discuss his book on Obama. Among other things, he noted how careful the President is in understanding the need for nuance when […]
At last, a new Ian McEwan novel: Solar. The author’s website recites a list of reviews; there are so many. Tucked among them is a nod to a blog post […]
Dominique Browning’s book, excerpted in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, will tell her story. Her story is more than just this, but it begins with this: she was the extremely […]
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 […]