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.
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 […]
Is evidence of shorter sentences—or no sentences at all—evidence of shallower emotions? “A kind of death of the sentence by collective neglect,” is how Adam Haslett puts it.
If Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, would he be counseling us on how to find happiness, or would he merely be setting an example of how to […]
In a post on the New York Review of Books website, historian Garry Wills again compared Obama to Abraham Lincoln, a comparison uniquely compelling when assessed by Wills, our most […]
On the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy had to give a speech. In a world before blogs, Kennedy was in the awkward, yet history-making position […]
If the following combination of names has meaning to you, the answer is yes: Desean, Lesean, Jeremy, Michael, Brent. Football and philosophy don’t often share the same Op-Ed column, but […]
So he will write a book, even if he does not want to write a book. “I don’t want to write this book, but I have to,” Assange said, and […]
He didn’t look back. David Remnick’s recent thoughts on the Khodorjovsky trial, its parallels—and non-parallels—to an earlier Soviet prosecution (of poet Josef Brodsky) made us think about poets, diplomats, and […]
It is the perfect time for teenagers who love writing, and writers, to have an outlet for their creativity: they are, or soon will be, reading Salinger in class, and […]
The leaks are catastrophic. The leaks are not catastrophic. Diplomacy’s at risk. Diplomacy’s redeemed. While we develop the questions and wait for the answers, let’s parse another, less quixotic topic […]
Why should he be afraid of Julian Assange? (We might well assume he is not afraid of anyone.) But Mr. Putin’s classically Slavic cool when addressing what he termed “not […]
The stories intertwine on the point of personality: is Mark Zuckerberg a genius? Is Julian Assange? At what point does (at least in Aaron Sorkin’s vision of the Facebook founder, […]
Maureen Dowd brought it up, but we are happy she did: it’s an excellent time to remember Kipling, and in particular to remember his most celebrated line from “Arithmetic on […]
Or, could Call of Duty: Black Ops take precedence on syllabi over The Illiad? This question has fresh relevance when considering Charlie Crist’s current dilemma: to pardon, or not, the […]
Today, President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to Salvatore Augustine Giunta. This is the first time a living soldier has been awarded this honor since Vietnam. It is the […]
There is often a fine line between hagiography and take down in the most artful examples of journalistic profile. The New Yorker’s seductive piece on politician-scholar-soldier-writer-potential future British Prime Minister […]
It is Kafka-esque, the Letter from Krasnokamensk Jail, circa 2010: The New York Times has run the Russian oligarch’s statement, the statement he delivered in front of his judge, and […]
Jill Lepore, in her New Yorker piece on Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life (and on, more broadly, biography), put it beautifully: “There is no humility in monumental biography. But there […]
In this brief video accompanying their obituary, the New York Times asks Ted Sorenson to discuss his relationship with President Kennedy. It was a relationship without contemporary analog, like Sorenson […]
Let us now praise Doonesbury, a body of work and a work of art that could be compared to the Bayeux Tapestry, and which also has been compared, in the […]
It is not often that a celebrity memoir makes the leap from the front page of the New York Times Arts section to its Op-Ed page, but then what less […]