The Intellectual in Public Life
What is the role of intellectual expertise and debate in public life? Drawing on his experience as an editor at Lingua Franca: the Review of Academic Life, the Boston Globe Ideas section, the New York Times magazine and Farrar Straus Giroux, Alexander Star will discuss the ever-changing nexus of ideas and politics since the 1990s, He will explore the legacy of the 1990s culture wars, the relevance of the humanities in an age dominated by technology and the life sciences, the challenging economics of publishing books and journals, and the circulation of ideas in a time of TED talks and Twitter. He will also examine the possibilities and pitfalls of academic writing for a general audience, and the dilemmas of argument and analysis posed by the Trump presidency.
Alexander Star
Alexander Star is a senior editor at the publishing house of Farrar Straus Giroux, where he works primarily on nonfiction. Among the titles he has edited are George Packer, The Unwinding; Asne Seierstad, One of Us; Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable; Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds; James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own; Thomas Friedman, Thank You for Being Late; and Barney Frank, Frank. He was previously the deputy editor of the New York Times Magazine, senior editor of The New York Times Book Review, the founding editor of the Boston Globe Ideas section, and, from 1994 to 2001, the editor of Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life. He has also worked as the assistant literary editor of The New Republic and been a Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Editor of the books Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy (Grove, 2011) and Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002), Star’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, London Review of Books, and other publications.