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.
As Foreign Affairs, the sine qua non of policy journals, changes editorial hands, outgoing Editor Jim Hoge has given the world a great gift: a selection of suggestions for What […]
It is not because Julian Assange reminds us of Errol Morris. It is because Julian Assange reminds us of Robert S. McNamara. His precision and self-assurance are coupled with mission, […]
One powerful woman picks up the phone. Thomas v. Hill, 2010. We now know that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has called Anita Hill, after twenty years, […]
He is charismatic. He is attractive. And perhaps his best weapon is an apparent agnosticism when it comes to the Money/Power manna of classic media moguls. Denton is a mogul, […]
Jamaican Prime Minister, Bruce Golding, in his interview with Big Think, confirms what we know: crime, like global capital markets, is uniquely, irrevocably networked. The rare drug crime might be […]
Today’s New York Times reported on the phenomenon of declining picture book sales—for children. Pictures, apparently, are not advanced enough for our little ones, even when they are still in […]
Give them stories. Let them read Henry James, Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, Theodor Dreiser. Let them read Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. And Styron, Roth, Didion, Bellow, Franzen. Open the treasure […]
An companion piece to Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra’s elegant Times Op-Ed on India is Isaac Chotiner’s essay in the Times Book Review on (literary magazine)Granta’s Pakistan Issue. Chotiner references Pakistani […]
One cannot put it much better than this: Literature is a felicity, but it is not a festival. It is a proposal, or an infinity of proposals, for an emendation, […]
Who gets to say who owns our libraries, and what are the risks embedded in making a library profit-driven? The New York Times choice to give Library Systems and Services […]
Is there a truly “revolutionary” element in the current surge of anger in American politics? What is the place of madness and irrationality in revolution? If we want to speak […]
What is intellectual property? What is privacy? These questions play out daily now, and those in a position to answer them occasionally shift their views, but the questions surrounding the […]
If a cliché is beautifully wrought does it save it from the evils of being cliché? David Brooks does not like what he refers to as the “Quiet Desperation dogma” […]
In last month’s Harper’s, Gary Greenberg writes in “The War on Happiness: Goodbye Freud, Hello Positive Thinking,” that, increasingly and unavoidably, the concept of enlightenment via sitting in a room […]
“But ultimately, the world of high finance, [Stone] said, is just a backdrop for a film ‘about trust, love, greed betrayal.’” This is from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Dealbook column in […]
Because whatever becomes of the allocation of electronic rights, the death of chain stores, or (even) the recurring flirtations of this novelist or that poet with risky new forms, we […]
In Greek mythology, the gods sometimes punished man by fulfilling his wishes too completely. This is the first line of Henry Kissinger’s 1957 Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Always controversial, […]
The New Yorker’s “Notes on Mourning,” excerpts of Roland Barthes’s (are they?) journal entries regarding the loss of his mother, are extraordinary. They are worth reading for anyone interested in […]
Summer is over. Now fall begins. When we think back on this season in this year will we remember the books, the songs, the finals of the U.S. Open (or […]
Let them build it. Is this what the rationalists want us to say? Let them build it. These four words counter the one, more emotional one—never—echoing across anger from the […]
When Sting sang “Young teacher/the subject/of school-girl fantasy,” it may well have been that he was thinking about an English teacher in a certain place and time, having been one […]
Aslan, C.S. Lewis’s lion, has meant many different things to many different readers at many different times. He means one thing to the scholar and another to the child. He […]
The Ice Storm, Rick Moody’s novel, was published in 1994, set in 1973. One of the things readers who loved the book but were not yet born (or were barely […]
Frank Rich’s piece in the New York Review of Books, “Why Has He Fallen Short?” questions the benefits of raw intelligence as the key skill for political life. Or rather, […]
Is it possible that it is not yet boring to talk about the end of books, the end of literature, the increasingly (at once obsessive and trite) making rare of […]
Harvard Business School alumni have been passing around an article via email. David Brooks referenced it on the Times Op-Ed page. The article was written by Professor Clayton Christensen, one […]
Making America fall in love with Don Draper is dangerous, because we will want to be him, or be with him, and both of these will bring moral compromise.
Tell your children not to write anything down. Tell them that this phenomenon, this global mania for being public about every aspect of our lives, is something that will catch […]
They have always loved him. But now the media is more in love with President Clinton than ever, as they have something simple and straightforward to celebrate: the marriage of […]
There will be more. Julian Assange has assured us this: there will be more. Do we want more? Will the release of more classified material place more lives at risk? […]