As Jay Parini ambles his way into Steve’s Park Diner on an icily bright February morning, “Hollywood” is the last word that comes to mind. When I see a middle-aged man with slow, deliberate movements ease into the diner I doubt that it could be Parini — this guy was too ordinary, too normal to be an established writer hedging his way onto the silver screen with a feature film adaptation of his critically acclaimed 1990 novel, The Last Station.

Steve’s has a diminutive presence on Merchant’s Row at the edge of Middlebury’s snow-pocked campus. Narrow as a trailer with its stormy-hued exterior and hopeful American Flag it could be Anyplace, USA; but it’s not. It’s the infamous locale of Parini’s fastidious morning writing routine. Once inside it is easy to see that there is a safety in Steve’s ruggedness that could be conducive for cozying up with some work. With antique cans of maple syrup lining the counter, smells of pancakes wafting from the open kitchen, white ceramic plates veined from usage and hushes of breakfast conversations, the diner is a warm hug to the senses.

Like the diner itself, Parini oozes small town Vermont. He is tall, but un-intimidating in his maroon sweatshirt, Franciscan haircut and rimless glasses. His shape is not round, but soft and when he smiles his kind eyes squint up under dark brows. We take a seat in a wooden booth close to the front, and he easily delivers his order without looking at the menu (eggs, potatoes, extra crispy bacon, toast, coffee) to a waitress who knows his name; a testament to his well-known ritual of writing in this small space with a dime-store notebook, a pencil and a volume of poetry for inspiration.

However, “he has a very deceptive presence,” as his mentor and author Alastair Reid observes. “Even though he looks as though he’s completely lost in the world, he is extremely acute, extremely attentive and very imaginative.”

Parini is a modern day man of letters. In addition becoming a fixture during three decades at Middlebury College and the prestigious Breadloaf Writers Conference it hosts every summer, he has produced a steady stream of biographies, fiction, criticism, essays, and poetry that would be the envy of any writer. Despite his prodigious output, Parini has managed to hover beneath the mainstream radar. Some time back an uncle even lamented, “with your brains you could have been a lawyer.” And in the words of one friend, Parini just may be the “hardest working writer you’ve never heard of.”

All that may be about to change since his film’s September 4 premier at the Telluride Film Festival premier. It will garner even more publicity as it is released in North American and European cinema by October. Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s tragic last year is at the epicenter of the feature, but Parini’s story is told through the concentric viewpoints of Tolstoy’s fragmented entourage. The film is already inciting Oscar buzz on websites like The Film Experience and Oscar Frenzy. An A-list line-up includes Academy Award Winner Helen Mirren as Sofya Tolstoy, Academy Award Nominees Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy and Paul Giamatti as Vladimir Chertkov and James McAvoy as Valentin Bulgakov. Michael Hoffman is the writer/director.

This movie venture is just the tip of the iceberg as Hollywood is currently enamored by turn-keying Parini’s novels into films and Parini continues to be up for the challenge. Hoffman is working on an adaptation of The Apprentice Lover; a collaboration is in the works between Parini and a well-known, un-named Irish Director for an adaptation of Benjamin’s Crossing; and Parini is co-authoring a script with Andy Breckman that will be a biopic of Robert Frost’s life. Francis Ford Coppola had Parini adapt his first novel, The Love Run, for the big screen, but Parini dislikes the story and would be just as pleased if it were never made.

“There seems to be so many film projects swirling around my work that I am put in touch with a lot of people in the theatre and film world,” Parini muses. His tone strikes a delicate balance between an acceptance of his accomplishments and a modesty about them. “I think I’ve been, even to myself, surprisingly successful.”

Although Parini sees himself primarily as a poet who happens to dip into other genres, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ascribe him such a simple epithet. Poetry is Parini’s literary home base; it is where he entered the writing world, it is at the core of his scholarly work and it provides the content for most of the courses he teaches at Middlebury. It is also a form of spiritual contemplation for Parini who uses his daily sessions as a vehicle to balance his life and make sense of his experiences. “The goal of poetry is like the goal of meditation and the goal of religion,” Parini explains. “It helps us organize our thoughts, it helps us be in touch with our feelings, it helps us get closer to the earth.”

Parini situates himself as a traditional poet who’s natural free-verse rhythm helps him explore both personal and political realms. As an earnest reader, Parini’s mind is always filled with the voices of other writers and his poetry is heavily dotted with their echoes. He has been seen as an authority on the value of poetry and was recruited by Yale University Press to write Why Poetry Matters (2007). The book has since been reissued in paperback and is now widely being used as a textbook for poetry in introductory poetry courses.

Reconciling the voice of Parini as an ethereal poet with that of a screenwriter rubbing shoulders with Hollywood’s top tier isn’t as problematic as one might think. Since the nascent days of his career in academia and writing, Parini has been blind to genre-boundaries. After publishing his first collection of poems, Singing in Time, in 1972, he has entered each new literary frontier effortlessly. He debuted as a biographer of Theodore Roethke in 1979 and premiered as a novelist with The Love Run in 1980. Although he notes today that both were “pretty lousy,” they set the precedent for his unprecedented career. “I don’t know if there is another American writer who has worked in virtually every genre,” Parini observes. “I don’t think there is anything I haven’t tried my hand at.”

Poet and College of William and Mary English Professor Henry Hart was one of Parini’s earliest students when he first started his teaching career at Dartmouth College in 1975. Hart is equally impressed by Parini’s incessant willingness to explore unchartered territories. “Nothing surprises me about Jay. If you told me he was getting into shape to climb Mount Everest so that he could write a book about the experience, I still wouldn’t be surprised.”

Parini’s youth in working-class Pittston, Pennsylvania set the stage for his uninhibited genre-jumping. Parini’s parents were not the “bookish” type. His mother had dropped out of the local high school in the ninth grade to become a waitress and his father took a short reprieve from school at the age of 12 to help his family by working on local farms. Their educational journeys allowed them to be the ideal parents for an experimental writer; they were supportive of Parini’s literary ventures, but completely void of judgement and agenda. “I was totally free to do whatever I wanted in the realm of writing.”

Since Parini views the aim of all writing to be clarity, truth and understanding the category of writing that leads him to that place is insignificant. “You don’t pick up one of his books and wave it about as if it defines him.” Reid explains. “Everything he’s written has been part of a whole.”

The notion of a distillation toward silence is insisted upon through much of his bibliography. In the namesake poem of his collection The Art of Subtraction, he writes “I’m back this afternoon, in autumn, / sitting where I used to, / trying, once again, to clear my head, / subtract the last things I don’t need, / get down to only / what cannot be shaken loose or said.” Again in his essay on “Poetry and Silence” Parini writes that “The greatest irony of poetry, and language itself, is that the most complete expression involves a total erasure of the medium as the speaker arrives at a condition of understanding so complete that speech becomes superfluous.”

Michael Van Valkenburgh stands on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the traffic of Robert Moses’ two-tiered Brooklyn-Queens Expressway roaring beneath him. He looks out on the post-industrial wasteland of Piers 1 through 6, an unsightly expanse of exposed concrete and asphalt, framed by the downtown Manhattan skyline. It is hard to imagine that this stretch of grays and browns will be turned into one of New York City’s largest green spaces within the next decade. It is equally hard to imagine that this man in the thick-framed glasses, paint-speckled gray hooded sweatshirt, and sage scarf will oversee this historic feat of urban planning and landscape design. With his copious laugh lines and perma-tousled hair, bordering on an uncombed faux-hawk, he looks more like an aging indie rock star or a celebrity chef than this generation’s answer to Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer responsible for Central Park and Prospect Park.

“This Promenade is something that our park has a very strong dialogue with,” he says, as he looks over the ledge at the construction site of the future Brooklyn Bridge Park. “This is a perch, a prospect, a thing above, a thing for looking down. Our park is all about activating and engaging the water’s edge. This is the more classic. I think this is something that distinguishes what we’re doing from what Olmsted might have done.” There is an undertone of the class warrior in this statement, whether intentional or not. Moses’ Promenade was for the residents of Brooklyn Heights. His park will be for everyone.

Stretching from the Manhattan Bridge south toward Atlantic Avenue, the 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park will represent one of the largest expansions of parkland in Brooklyn since Olmsted completed Prospect Park in the 1860s. Encompassing the long-defunct Piers 1 through 6, which became obsolete with the advent of container shipping, the park will reclaim these lifeless vistas and replace them with great lawns, rolling pastoral meadows, and tidal saltwater marshes. In a bold move for a New York City park, the landscape will also be highly connected to the water. Floating wave attenuators will create a safe harbor that allows visitors to actually enter the East River without worrying about the smashing wakes from passing ships. One of the most innovative design features of the park involves cutting off the piers from the land, essentially turning them into islands which will be connected to the park via footbridges.

Though his projects are uniquely modern in their embracing of contemporary design concepts like ecological sustainability and reclamation of toxic post-industrial sites, Van Valkenburgh’s ideas are in constant dialogue with the great urban planners of New York City’s past, such as Olmsted and Robert Moses. Paul Goldberger, New Yorker architecture critic and co-editor of the upcoming Michael Van Valkenburgh: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes (Yale University Press), writes in the book’s foreword, “Where Van Valkenburgh finds complete common ground with Olmsted is in his commitment to the notion of the public park as an expression of the democratic idea. Both landscape architects embrace the notion of public space as the equalizer, the place open to all where distinctions diminish, social classes fade into the background, and peaceful coexistence prevails. Van Valkenburgh shares Olmsted’s democratic idealism.”

Although Van Valkenburgh agrees with Olmsted’s overarching views on the role of public spaces, the two designers differ significantly in their ideas about copying nature. Like Brooklyn Bridge Park, Olmsted’s grand creations were wholly constructed and man-made, but he worked to obscure this artificiality. As Goldberger writes, Olmsted was “quite willing to let you think that the park’s designer was not Olmsted but God.” Van Valkenburgh has no such delusions. Anita Berrizbeitia, associate chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s landscape architecture department and Goldberger’s co-editor, argues that Van Valkenburgh is consciously upfront about the artificiality of his designs. “He doesn’t want to tell people that it’s natural,” Berrizbeitia says. “Michael is very committed to showing people the necessary artificiality of nature because of what we have done to the cities before.” Because of the devastation caused by industrialization, designers can no longer pretend that their parks are untouched or natural.

Ironically, despite this fundamental difference in theory and approach, Van Valkenburgh’s designs often incorporate the unkempt naturalism better associated with the nineteenth-century designers. Michael Van Valkenburgh has become the go-to landscape architect for projects which require an aesthetic complexity, one that stands in stark contrast with the Zen-like simplicity of contemporary, corporate landscape design. Goldberger writes, “Van Valkenburgh is not one of those modernist landscape architects who you suspect would rather be designing buildings. He shows no interest in embracing the minimalist aesthetic of his architect colleagues, like so many of his fellow landscape designers.” One imagines the archetypal city plaza, tucked between two sleek skyscrapers, constructed with elegant pavers and straight rows of thin, perfect trees – a far cry from Van Valkenburgh’s Teardrop Park in Battery Park City. Completed in 2006, the park contains granite boulders, naturalistic plantings, a small constructed wetland area, and an imposing rock wall made from New York State sedimentary rocks. The nearly two-acre space, surrounded by four high-rise apartments in downtown Manhattan, is dynamic and wild. It represents an escape from the rigidness of the surrounding buildings, not a reflection of them.

While in Austin on a speaking gig at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW), one of the world’s largest digital media conferences, the thing that struck Khoi Vinh above all else had nothing to do with digital media or technology.

“Silly as it may seem,” he later wrote on his popular design blog, subtraction.com, “the one thing I really can’t stop thinking about is how bad the conference schedule, map and badges were this year.” The printed materials were unusable, in his opinion.

So Vinh did what he does best—sat down and designed a better one. Diagrammatic sketches laid out his ideas: perforated pages so that pages could be discarded as days passed; a booklet small enough to fit inside the conference badge pouch; a fold-out map beneath the schedule so that both could be scanned simultaneously, color codes coordinating events with their geographical locations on the map. Together, these innovations are designed to guide interaction between the products and the users who encounter them.

If Vinh can do for journalism what he did for SXSW’s print materials, perhaps the ailing industry has a chance of survival. That’s why The New York Times hired Vinh as design director three years ago to direct their website, nytimes.com.

“I think in the next year or two news organizations will have to make some major decisions about the role of print versus online,” said Times executive editor Bill Keller in a Q&A in January. “The fact is, we don’t really know yet how the behavior of readers and advertisers will evolve.” But, he added, “I’m optimistic because there are a lot of smart, creative people in the company studying the business model for quality journalism and devising ways to change it.”

Khoi Vinh is one of those people. With the help of innovators like him, publishing outlets like the Times are trying to redefine how news can be experienced—and maybe, just maybe, save journalism in the process.

Attendees line the walls. The room is the largest in the 2009 SXSWi conference, but this event is overbooked. Vinh is tall and gangly, dressed in all black, his boyish face dominated by a sweep of black hair and a pair of oversized wireframe glasses. The crowd cheers as he walks onto the stage and takes his place at the table behind his microphone.

“My name is Khoi Vinh,” he says to the packed room. An anonymous fan lets out a loud “wooo!” to cheers and laughter.

“Thank you,” Vinh deadpans. “I’ll have that twenty bucks for you after the talk.”

Despite Vinh’s attempt at levity, the gathering is serious: it’s a panel discussion entitled “Designing the Future of The New York Times,” and Vinh is a featured speaker along with his boss, Tom Bodkin, current assistant managing editor of graphics and design director of the Times’ print edition.

“What does the future of newspapers look like?” Bodkin asks the audience in the panel’s introduction. “Nobody, including us, knows for sure.”

That print journalism is fighting for its life isn’t exactly breaking news. The Chicago Tribune filed for bankruptcy in December 2008; The Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed its print business in March and The San Francisco Chronicle may be headed for the same fate. On April Fools’ Day, The Guardian announced it would begin publishing only 140-character “tweets”—a prank story, but one that rings eerily plausible these days. The Times itself has had a rough year. This April, it reported a first-quarter loss of $74.5 million, dwarfing 2008’s loss of $335,000. Advertising dropped 28.4%, and the very existence of The Boston Globe is now in doubt.

Oddly enough, the Grey Lady doubles as a veritable new media journalism laboratory. It has been rolling out its experiments on nytimes.com in rapid succession: blogs have popped up in every section, encouraging direct reporter-to-reader interaction. Times People, the paper’s social network, enables users to share and discuss their favorite stories. A Global Edition (now linked to the newspaper’s global edition, The International Herald Tribune) allows users to view the paper depending on their interest in international news. A Times Extra feature posts links to external news sources on the same topic—a practice that the paper’s philosophy once precluded. Times Extra is especially significant, Vinh points out, because the Times, like many mainstream media outlets, was at first reluctant to acknowledge outside news sources. Now that aggregation is all the rage, perhaps even the Times’ editors realize that it has a place in their own publication.

These experiments are the fruits of Vinh’s expertise. He is a different kind of a designer, concerned less with how the site looks than the way readers interact with it. The goal, he says, is for the Times to become a medium-agnostic publication, whether read on a web browser, on a mobile phone or via future technologies.

Vinh is a pioneer in the field of interaction design, which defines the interactive relationship between content and user. Imagine the relationship between the reader and newspaper as an ongoing “conversation”: the content itself can react to its readers’ actions. In a system like Times People, users don’t just read the content. They build a community with the tools Vinh provides—tools which are continually refined as the community grows (or fails to).

“We really look at our work as trying to create a platform,” says Vinh. “nytimes.com is really a platform that helps people make the most of our content—not just read the content, but to make as much use of it as they can.”

Investigative journalist Alyssa Katz stared across the table at the two developers. “One looked like she hadn’t been out of her car in a month,” Katz recalls. The other, she observed, “had either just come off a bender or needed the services of a top dermatologist.” But Katz pitied the dreary characters—who took over her co-op and were under intense pressure to sell—even though they represent some of the most culpable parties in the country’s recent real estate bust. Katz’s new book, Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us (Bloomsbury USA, 2009), explores the mortgage crisis’ long history and far-reaching impact. It reads like a post-mortem on the financial mechanisms, government policies and social phenomena that led to the current crisis—ending with Katz’s own experience navigating the shark-infested waters of New York City real estate.

Most Thursdays, Katz can be found at Ditmas Workspace in Ditmas Park, a recently gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood noted for its historic homes and other landmarks. The Workspace, founded by journalist and Politico.com blogger Ben Smith, is an office co-op that rents out desk space by the month. With its dark wood trim and picture windows, the converted Victorian feels more like a bed and breakfast than a neighborhood office. Katz calls the Workspace a sort of newsroom, where she can share ideas and resources with editors, writers and other journalists working there. Writers Nancy Scola and Geronimo Madrid both keep desks at the DW, as do playwright Scott Organ and Smith himself.

“She’s incredibly well-placed to explain the thing that everyone in America wants to know, which is: What the hell happened to the housing market?” says Smith of Katz, whom he met about a year ago through the Workspace. “She’s got a kind of granular knowledge that’s really rare among people who don’t work in the industry, combined with a broader perspective you rarely get from insiders.”

Just weeks from the release of the book, Katz is geared up for promotion. Sitting at a small desk in one of the sunny side rooms, she answers questions at a breathless clip, propelled by the force of the facts she has stored. With unruly hair and wide eyes, Katz looks simultaneously focused and baffled. Her brow furrows as she speaks, her eyes widen, she gestures emphatically with her hands: Every ounce of her being seems consumed with getting her point across.

Katz is, to her knowledge, the first journalist to make the connection between a glut of increasingly risky mortgages and the financial interests of Wall Street. It all began when she was an editor at City Limits in the late ’90s, working on a story about mortgage loan fraud under the government-funded Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program. City Limits journalist Kemba Johnson received a tip from a local lawyer who claimed that tenants living in SRO (single-room occupancy) housing in Harlem were being kicked out under strange circumstances. Katz, who edited the story, said the tenants “woke up in the morning and there were guys literally knocking down their walls and telling them they had to get out.” As it turned out, nonprofits were sometimes buying homes that were not yet vacated, and contractors were unceremoniously running these tenants out once the properties were sold.

Johnson investigated further and discovered that these nonprofits, which were ostensibly helping poor residents, were actually dealing in real estate. Mortgage companies were buying properties cheaply in Harlem and other low-income neighborhoods, and then quickly selling them to nonprofits for prices up to 100 percent more than what the mortgage companies originally paid. Appraisers would approve the values for these homes, which were often rundown and in need of gutting. The nonprofits, believing they were creating more affordable housing, bought the homes using government-insured HUD loans, without seeing them or knowing how much the mortgage companies originally paid. This led to a tidy profit for mortgage companies and the appraisers that served them; and dilapidated, shoddily renovated homes for the nonprofits.

“It’s very similar stuff to that went on recently, lots of flipping and fake appraisals,” Katz says of the story. “When you have a lending program that isn’t very well managed or monitored, this is going to happen inevitably.”

Johnson completed her investigative piece, “The Harlem Shuffle,” in 1999. It led to convictions for several of those involved in the scheme and eventually turned up as a plotline on The Sopranos.

Katz left City Limits in 2005 when she was awarded Columbia University’s prestigious Revson Fellowship for urban studies. She decided to revisit the Harlem story to see how HUD reforms were faring. Soon she realized the subprime market had taken over the mortgage industry. Katz then proposed an investigative piece for Mother Jones in October 2005, with no idea of how timely her work would be. By the time the book was completed, the mortgage crisis had built to a crescendo and crashed, taking the world economy with it.

Katz traces the current crisis to changes in mortgage lending going back to the late 1960s, when riots, white flight and historically inequitable lending led to a Civil Rights Movement for fair access to credit. A political cry raised in the 1920s, again in the ’70s, and once more by Bill Clinton in the ’90s touted homeownership as a way to turn troubled neighborhoods into prosperous communities where residents were invested in the quality of their homes and blocks. Access to fair credit for everyone was presented to minority residents in particular as the solution to everything from poverty to crime. The problem, Katz says, lay in the rapid deregulation of mortgage loans to give urban poor that access.

“This isn’t just the story about a terrible, misguided campaign,” she points out. “One of the great tragedies here was that the misguided efforts that were driven by politics and greed and naiveté had grown out of a Civil Rights Movement push to promote access to home ownership.”

Katz began her research for the Mother Jones article (which would become Chapter 4 of the book) in Cleveland, Ohio. She wanted to discover why there were so many foreclosures in the area. A self-described “data geek,” Katz was content to sit among the stacks at Cleveland Law Library, poring over city records to find the juicy bits of information that, collectively, formed a frightening pattern.

Sean Shesgreen’s Introduction to Literary Theory class begins with a thud. Students sit up straighter, at attention. The short, compact Irishman drops the Norton Anthology of English Literature—all four pounds of it—onto a desk. “Here is the canon,” he exclaims, grinning back at the startled faces.

Since the publication of its first edition in 1962, the Norton has set the reading lists for British Literature courses throughout the world—its impossibly thin pages introducing Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth to generation after generation of college students. The condensed version comes in at just under three thousand pages. But this venerable institution, which has sold roughly nine million copies over eight editions and accounts for more than a third of the publisher’s total revenue, has made a little enemy in the cornfields of Illinois.

Shesgreen, distinguished research professor of English at Northern Illinois University, puts high stakes money and intrigue front and center in his essay “Canonizing the Canonizer: A Short History of the Norton Anthology of English Literature,” published in the Winter 2009 issue of the journal Critical Inquiry. He presents documents that depict the competition between the Norton and the upstart Longman Anthology of British Literature—first published in 1999 and now in its third edition—as an ivory-tower death-match, with Norton going to any lengths to remain on top of the academic textbook heap.

The essay has sparked outraged responses from the Norton’s defenders who call Shesgreen unqualified and his work a hatchet job. But Shesgreen, a specialist in 18th century British literature and longtime admirer of the Norton, did not start out to cause a stir.

Shesgreen, whose cropped goatee frames a mischievous smile, characterizes his academic life as the study of “marginal people and outcasts.” Aptly, his most recent book, Images of the Outcast, examines how London’s urban poor have been portrayed in various visual arts. Shesgreen has found himself an outcast several times in his own life. He entered a monastery as a young man in Ireland, which soon sent him abroad to the United States. He arrived in America amid the social upheaval of the sixties and quickly realized the monk’s life was not for him. He fled to pursue a Ph.D. in English at Northwestern. He was an exile from his home country and now from his religion as well.

Soon, he alienated himself again, this time from one of literature’s most powerful organizations. In 1969, Shesgreen and several colleagues interrupted a Modern Language Association conference in New York to protest the organization’s apolitical stance on the Vietnam War. The protests temporarily closed down the conference, and Shesgreen was arrested along with two confederates.

“I spent the night in the Tombs of New York,” he recalls, laughing. “As a result of our protest the hotel was shut down, and I think it did move the MLA to become more politically active.”

Despite his agitator past, Shesgreen says he intended merely to write a conventional history of the Norton. HHe had long been interested in the list of editors on the Norton’s title page. How were these people chosen? And what effect did they have on the study of British literature? He began collecting every edition, including the first. That list of editors contained no women and was packed with what he calls “white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants exclusively from elite universities.” Shesgreen wanted to know how these original editors influenced the content of later editions: what had changed and what remained the same?

In, 2003, at the encouragement of then Norton general editor M.H. Abrams, Shesgreen traveled to Cornell to examine materials relating to the construction of the original anthology from 1962, including Abrams’ original notes and personal correspondences. What he found did not amount to much.

“He didn’t look at his files before I came out to see if the material I was looking for was there,” Shesgreen says. “When I got there I found exactly three letters covering the beginning of the Norton.” He feared his trip had been a waste of time.

Near the end of his stay, however, Abrams gave Shesgreen a folder that he had just recently found. Shesgreen’s eyes went wide at what he found inside: a series of e-mails from 1998 exchanged between the anthology’s editors and Norton executives in New York. Shesgreen saw an organization obsessed with the threat posed by the new Longman Anthology of British Literature, and used what he terms “cutthroat tactics” in his article to undermine the competition.

As discreetly as he could, he rushed to the photocopier before catching his flight back to Illinois.

“At that point I knew I was onto something,” he remembers. “I had new information about the economics of the Norton.”

Academic publishing normally conjures images of musty libraries and stiff English professors. Shesgreen’s discoveries, on the other hand, seem ripped from the pages of a corporate thriller.

In 1998, the Norton’s new general editor Stephen Greenblatt met with Longman editor David Damrosch at a bar near Columbia University, where Damrosch shared some ideas he had for the upcoming Longman. Greenblatt passed this information to his publisher.

Shesgreen quotes a breathless e-mail to Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, from Norton vice president Julia Reidhead, in which she praises the renowned professor’s “bold infiltration of the opposing camp.”

“I want both to thank you for and to compliment you on that daring conversation,” she writes. “I keep thinking of James Bond suavely lifting a glass with Dr. No.”

Greenblatt’s spy games only left Norton executives wanting more. The Longman was the first competing anthology to be published in years, and according to Shesgreen, Norton was desperate to get a complete copy of the Longman’s table of contents. Later that year, they got it. Shesgreen again quotes an e-mail from Julie Reidhead.

Philosophers have never been touchstones for the millennial generation. Baudrillard, Barthes, and de Beauvoir may still be de rigueur in Intro to Philosophy courses, but they seldom emerge in the casual conversation of young urbanites. At the Greenwich Village IFC Center on a cold weekday in early March, tonight’s screenings of director Astra Taylor’s new philosophical documentary, Examined Life, is sold out. No one in the long line looks particularly like an academic. Most are well under 35 and outfitted in tight jeans, plaid shirts and ironic glasses. Is philosophy suddenly trendy?

Inside the theater, Taylor a slim, tall 29-year-old with large brown eyes accentuated by straight bangs, is fielding questions from the audience. A man in his 20s raises his hand. “Don’t you think that only people with a background in philosophy will get this movie?” he asks skeptically. “Do you really think it has something to offer people who aren’t already schooled in this stuff?”

Taylor tells me later she has heard this reaction before. Taylor doesn’t look the least bit fazed. “You know, the only people who ever ask that are academics who have PhDs and like to think that only they hold the key for understanding the material on screen.” After the Q&A, the man’s girlfriend approaches Taylor quietly. “You’re right about him,” she says, “he just got his PhD.”

Examined Life operates on a simple conceit. Eight philosophers expound on their worldviews while walking, rowing, or driving and generally interacting with the “real” world. Taylor’s motivation is partly cinematic, a way to escape the hackneyed “talking head” documentary style. But it’s also the basis of her own belief — that philosophy is a part of, not apart from, the world. The film boasts a roster of some of the most respected and well-known modern philosophers and thinkers: Slavoj Žižek, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Peter Singer and Avital Ronell. They’re each allotted ten minutes to grapple with conundrums of contemporary life, including consumption, revolution, and interpersonal connection.

Onscreen, the philosophers are introduced by name only, san credentials, because Taylor is set on allowing the audience to educate themselves. “People were trying to get me to add biographies of the subjects,” she says. “They’d say, ‘In a fun sentence, describe this person’s life work.’ I can’t even conceive of what that sentence would be.” If a viewer wants to know who Peter Singer is, they can look him up on their iPhone. “I’m more interested in people misinterpreting the film in an interesting way than I am in them knowing the entire back story and history of thought that got them to this point,” she says.

Filmed in smooth tracking shots from locations like New York’s Thompson Square Park to the shores of Lake Michigan, Examined Life is unusually beautiful to look at, the polar opposite of the jerky handheld camera work and stock footage that make up the standard documentary. At times, the camera drifts away from the philosophers to focus on representative images around them. When Peter Singer talks about the questionable ethics of buying expensive shoes while other people live in poverty, his speech is intercut with rows of shopping bags lining the arms of tourists. As Martha Nussbaum points out that we’re all to some extent disabled during childhood and old age, a girl and her grandmother are shown strolling nearby.

Universal might be a better word than trendy when describing the appeal of Examined Life. Both 90-year-olds and 19-year-olds approach Taylor telling her they love the philosophers in her movie (especially Cornel West). Truck drivers, dentists, students, and housepainters have all had something positive to say about the experience of watching thinkers pontificate in her film. J. Hoberman, in his review of Examined Life for the Village Voice, offers evidence of the growing popularity of the philosophical film by coining a catchy name for the genre—the “philoso-doc.”

Could this be the beginning of the end for the cultural cliché of Americans as content in their ignorance, uninterested in questions and theories? The intellectual tradition has been the backbone of European culture for centuries, but in America, philosophy doesn’t even make it into the required course list for college freshmen. Taylor believes that in the U.S., “there is a massive underestimation of what people are capable of and what people are interested in.” In an e-mail exchange, Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago writes that studying philosophy is “so rare, so let’s hope this is the beginning of something. Because I believe that what philosophy provides is absolutely fundamental to democracy.”

Michael Hardt, a Professor at Duke University and co-author of the Neo-Marxist Empire, regards Taylor’s quest to bring philosophy into the real world admirable, but he has reservations about ignoring the entertaining function of film. “The combination between philosophers and film is an awkward and difficult one,” he says. “I think intrinsically philosophers are pretty boring. One goes to the cinema to be entertained, and there’s no way that philosophers can come through on that.” He makes a valid point. But if Examined Life is full of boring philosophers, why are young people eagerly buying tickets to see them speak? Hardt qualifies that some philosophers have a knack for performance, singling out the dramatic Cornel West, and the willfully absurd Slavoj Žižek. Certain thinkers have the ability to engage through sheer force of personality, and Taylor concentrates on philosophers who possess an inherent charisma.

Taylor has always been drawn to humanitarian and sociological subjects. Her first film project was as co-director of The Miracle Tree, a short film about Senegalese infant malnutrition, in 2001. She went on to produce the documentary Persons of Interest, centered around the arrests of Muslim-Americans, post 9/11, which was selected for the Sundance Film Festival. But her first feature film, made in 2005 when she was only 26, was also her first attempt to make philosophy cinematic. A documentary about Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, appropriately titled Žižek!, it established her as a serious director. She floated the idea to Lawrence Konner, the producer she had worked with on Persons of Interest, but he only agreed to the project after seeing the 2002 philosophy documentary Derrida. “The Derrida film created a little opening and he recognized that,” Taylor says. “He had actually gone to see Derrida at Film Forum and thought, ‘These films can work. Let’s give it a go.’”

Children of the sixties and seventies may remember Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Over the course of a 17-day motorcycle trip across the northern United States, Pirsig’s narrator uses the relationship between man and bike to reflect on technology and reason. “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower,” reads a typical passage. Academics dismissed his ideas as New Age bunk. The public bought four million copies.

Thirty-five years later, Penguin Press is hoping to repeat Pirsig’s success with a new philosopher-mechanic of their own. In late May it will release Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Matthew Crawford’s jeremiad against white collar culture and the educational system designed to populate it.

Crawford, who has a Ph.D. in political thought from the University of Chicago, takes America to task for devaluing skilled manual language. Trade work, he argues, is more psychologically, financially, and intellectually satisfying than the white-collar information-processing jobs for which schools and colleges typically educate their students.

Crawford grew the book out of a piece he wrote for the conservative online journal The New Atlantis in 2006. The essay drew the attention of many, including 100,000 unique visitors on the web and New York Times columnist David Brooks, who named it one of the best of the year. Brooks joined Crawford’s condemnation of “the way managers take decision-making authority away from workers, the way parents take decision-making authority away from kids, the way educators close off options without any debate.” By the end of the day, Crawford’s agent had sold the book to Vanessa Mobley, a young editor at Penguin Press known for her way with big ideas.

In person, Crawford manifests the quiet confidence of a guy who got over himself a long time ago. Sitting in the lobby of New York’s Roosevelt Hotel this spring, he wears jeans, a pressed navy blue button-down shirt—tucked in, sleeves rolled—and clean black suede work boots. He is coming from a meeting with his publishers, manuscript in hand. He places it on the coffee table in front of him, along with some cover options. There’s a line of encrusted dirt and motor oil under all of his fingernails. The former academic is happy with the final product. “It’s nice to have written something on a topic that people care about rather than some ancient Greek crap,” he says.

Manual work has been part of Crawford’s life since he started doing electrical work at age fourteen in the Northern California community where he grew up. As an undergraduate physics major at UC Santa Barbara, he became a freelance electrician to support himself through the summers.

Crawford was an indifferent student until his senior year, when he happened on his roommate’s copy of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Written by University of Chicago classics professor Allan Bloom, the 1987 polemic was an angry, unapologetic defense of high culture. In it Bloom credited liberal relativism and rock music with the decline of American universities and the degradation of our intellectual life. The book sold close to a million copies and turned a little-known academic into a celebrity.

It’s a book Crawford is now wary of associating himself with, given the extreme, reactions it often provokes. “It blew me away,” he admits, after some hesitation. “Bloom offered a convincing diagnosis of contemporary life by tracing our intellectual genealogy, showing the sources of our confused, taken-for-granted opinions in the works of serious thinkers. It was incredibly liberating and exciting.”

Crawford applied to do his graduate work at the University of Chicago in the hopes of studying with Bloom, but when they met, Crawford says diplomatically, they “didn’t hit it off,” and Bloom died shortly after Crawford arrived. The department is the stronghold of the ideas of influential conservative philosopher Leo Strauss and arguably one of the past century’s most influential schools of political philosophy. Crawford ended up writing a dissertation on Greek political thought with Nathan Tarcov, Bloom’s literary executor and an influential Straussian in his own right

After earning his Ph.D. in 2000, he received a post-graduate fellowship at the University’s prestigious Committee on Social Thought to turn his dissertation into a book. When the Marshall Institute, a conservative environmental think tank in Washington, D.C., offered Crawford a highly paid executive job, he accepted.

It turned out that his primary role was to develop arguments about climate change that happened to agree with those espoused by the oil interests subsidizing the Institute. “Coming up with the best arguments money could buy,” says Crawford, “wasn’t work befitting a free man.” He also felt that his boss was trying to turn him into the kind of knowledge worker whose plight he laments in his book, deprived of agency, carrying out instructions phrased in corporate “action” speak. He hated the job almost immediately.

Whereas Chicago had provided him with “an intensive apprenticeship in a shared set of authors, interpretive rubrics, ‘fundamental problems,’ a set of master keys that unlocked every door,” at the think tank he felt as if “the locks had been changed.”

When the police failed to stop a Brooklyn man from imprisoning his two Pakistan-born daughters last summer, Linda Sarsour was called for help. The father had brought the girls—aged 18 and 19—to the United States to have them married off to American citizens and then he kept them under virtual house arrest for two months while awaiting potential suitors. Calls to the police were of no use because the girls were of legal age. So they complained to their school, which looked, as it had in the past to Sarsour, who hatched a plan. The 28-year-old instructed the girls to leave school early, pack their bags before their father got home, and meet a driver waiting a few blocks away to avoid being followed. After notifying the girls’ mother in Pakistan and the NYPD, Sarsour pulled some strings and set the girls up with a new apartment at the Young Christian Women’s Association of Brooklyn, where she heads community outreach.

With her knee high boots, purple eyeliner and a head scarf tucked tightly around the contours of her face, the fast talking, finger-snapping Palestinian American, admits she’s “not your typical Y representative.”

But settling domestic abuse cases is just one of Sarsour’s jobs. Like many young Arab Americans, her career in social work was sparked largely by the events of 9/11, which continue to weigh heavily on the community in New York. Now, she’s being hailed as a potential candidate for public office in a city which has no elected Arab American officials and yet one of largest Arab American populations in the U.S.

“A lot of people don’t feel comfortable as Muslims speaking out on issues,” Sarsour explains in a thick Brooklyn accent. “They are so intimidated, whether it be their accent or 9/11. But for me, I don’t speak as a Muslim, I speak as a dog gone New Yorker and you better believe I-got- some-things-to-say-that-you need-to-listen-to kinda attitude.”

Over the last four years Sarsour has been building up a voting block in her community and forming alliances with other minority organizations across New York. She played an influential role in rallying her community behind the Democratic Party’s candidates in last year’s general election, and was also chosen to lead major canvassing efforts in Asian and Latino neighborhoods.

“She is a city wide leader for all immigrants, not just the Arab community,” says Jose Davila, head of state government affairs New York Immigration Committee, a multi-ethnic state-wide group which recently elected Sarsour as member of its board of directors.

But Sarsour faces an uphill battle in her struggle to build relationships with politicians and law enforcement officials. The NYPD recently issued an advisory on Islamic extremism, which she says is tantamount to concluding that “anything normal Muslims do is suspicion for terrorist activity.” Arab Americans have also been dogged by bad press in the recent presidential campaigns with both Obama and McCain accused of distancing themselves from the community. Obama’s Muslim outreach coordinator quit due to press attention over unsubstantiated claims that he had links to a radical preacher. McCain’s defense of Obama as “a good family man” when a supporter at a town hall meeting accused Obama of being “an Arab” is still fresh in the minds of many Arab Americans.

“We’re not a community politicians want to be hanging around with,” she explains from her other office in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn’s most heavily populated Arab neighborhood. There, on a street teeming with Arabic street signs, Sarsour heads a bustling community center known as the Arab American Association of New York, which she likens to “an Arab Ellis Island.”

Brooklyn is host to an estimated 24,000 Arabic speakers with about one third living in Bay Ridge, according to the 2000 Census. (Dearbon, Michgan holds the country’s highest Arab concentration at 30,000). Sandwiched in between hookah lounges and Arabic restaurants displaying whole fish on ice in their windows, the Association operates at out of a cramped one-story office building and is an expressway of human traffic. It serves everyone from the elderly looking for help applying for food stamps to teenagers bouncing off the walls in search of community service jobs.

During our meeting, a new case is thrust onto Sarsour’s shoulders every 10 minutes, either from office visitors or over her endlessly chirping cell phone. She responds with one liners or post-its, dolled out to staffers perpetually waiting in the hallway. “Common sense is just not common,” she says; a cookie in one hand as she rolls her eyes after hearing about a woman who tried to use a New York-issued Medicaid card in Michigan.

Sarsour spends about two days a week at the Association, and runs it largely over her cell phone the rest of the time. She is proud of the strides it has made since being established two months after the fall of the Twin Towers, when the Association functioned mainly as a liaison between the neighborhood and homeland security officials by offering translations and legal counseling. Viewed at first with suspicion in the largely Irish and Italian area (Arabs heritage is only claimed by 10 percent of Bay Ridge’s population), the Association has now established ties to local schools and hospitals. It offers counseling for students— as in the case of the two Pakistani girls imprisoned by their father—as well as help for Arabic-speaking parents. Sarsour says its efforts have improve parent’s participation in school events by offering translators, after school homework programs and adult English classes. It has also partnered with local hospitals to help offer affordable health care.

Last year, New York State Assemblywoman Janele Hyer-Spencer, whom Sarsour has campaigned for, helped the Association apply for a $250,000 government grant, which is being used to purchase new offices.

“For an Arab organization to get a quarter of a million dollars in a white neighborhood meant a lot to the community,” Sarsour says.

The Party in question was a moment in cultural history when the possibility of change filled the air, and Goldman was one of those who threw it. The venue was London, the date 1977; and for the first time disaffected multiracial youth were coming together, their shared outsider status providing a starting point for a more harmonious future. So affecting were the spirits of hope and unity filling the air that Bob Marley, at the time exiled in London, commemorated the Punky Reggae Party in a song of the same name.

Rejected by society
Mistreated with impunity
Protected by my dignity/I search for reality…It’s a punky reggae party…No boring old farts will be there.

Fast-forward 35 years to that downtown café, and Goldman had an answer for King: Yes. Despite having never taught before she would take up his offer to join the department’s faculty. The kids of today needed punky reggae. King was delighted. He had been looking to get Goldman on board ever since a visit to the New Museum of Contemporary Art to view a panel discussion on the life and work of Fela Kuti, a globally revered Nigerian musician and inventor of Afrobeat. To King, who put hip-hop on the NYU curriculum, Kuti was moreover one of the last great socially conscious artists, dedicated to fighting corrupt politics and institutionalised brutality in sub-Saharan Africa. So revered was the self-styled Black President that, in 1997, 150,000 people gathered in Tafawa Balewa Square, Nigeria, to follow his funeral procession.

“I was blown away,” King remembers, “Vivien is one of a kind, a real pioneer. She could talk poetically and poignantly about knowing Fela and visiting him in Nigeria [as a journalist], giving you a real sense of who he was as a human being. And second she could, at the same time, contextualize him historically as a musical and political icon. Usually people can do one or the other, but not both at the same time.”

Then again nothing about Goldman’s path to NYU could be described as usual. Daughter to the last in a long line of professional violinists, Goldman spent the 60s “locked away” in an Orthodox Jewish household where classical music filled the halls. With the 70s came a swift escape from North London to the University of Warwick, where Goldman tumbled into popular music and the nascent punk scene. Punk logic appealed to Goldman. It represented the coming together of youth in rejection of the dreary futures laid out for them by a post-recession, anachronistic society. Particularly for women, punk stood for freedom from the limited options offered by religious or traditionalist elders. Yes, women had been making music before punk, but men wrote their scripts and cast the molds: madonna or whore, case closed. In popular music, women were viewed as consumers or groupies, not active participants. The new punk order allowed young musicians like Goldman (following in the footsteps of the Slits, the Raincoats, the Mo-dettes) to challenge the ideas that had kept them off the stage.

Her most notable success was 1981’s Launderette. It is a slinky tale about a humdrum male: abstractly instrumented, experimental and infectious, the lyrics are a refreshing counterpoint to saccharine 60s pop and a reminder that love is not always sugary sweet, nor is pleasing a man woman’s absolute priority.

I can’t complain we went down the drain
Seems like I can’t get away from you even in the launderette
Now my socks see your socks in the dryer? And my jeans run into your shirt.

For the time being, however, Goldman was an English and American literature student. At Warwick she studied under the guard of famously swashbuckling feminist Germaine Greer. “Forceful and rather grumpy” is her not-so-fond recollection of the controversy-courting professor, “she was harder on women.” The strictures of Judaism had prepared the young rebel somewhat for being treated differently on the basis of gender; post-university, however, it would become an issue she was constantly reminded of.

Upon graduating Goldman joined Island Records in London, as Bob Marley’s PR. The role marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship with the reggae icon, and opened the music fan’s eyes to the currents of social consciousness that form the lifeblood of reggae music. Seven months later Goldman left Island to become a full-time music journalist, and by the close of the 70s had become punk and reggae authority to all members of the holy trinity of the English music press: New Musical Express, Sounds and Melody Maker (her career has outlived the last two).

“Music was the air I breathed, my absolute energy” Goldman wistfully remembers. Her characteristically racy, emphatic style of writing stands testament to that passionate relationship (“Yeah, that and the amphetamines,” she chuckles.)

It took some good old Jewish chutzpah to climb the all-male career ladder however: “I pinned the guy [Alan Lewis, editor of Sounds magazine] against the wall,” Goldman laughs, “Who around here is actually going to be better than me? I demanded.” Lewis relented, knocking the qualifying prefix off Goldman’s title of acting features editor. The rise in status brought with it greater access to the artists she admired. Although that didn’t equate to respect:

While interning at the State Department in 2005, Rachel Sterne watched Kofi Annan plead with the Security Council to intervene in the Darfur genocide. Unfortunately, nothing happened. From there, Sterne had a few options. She could add Darfur to the list of things beyond her control, become a humanitarian, join the government to add one more outraged voice to the UN mix, or buy a supportive “Save Darfur” t-shirt and turn the genocide into her go-to talking point for dinner parties.

But for Sterne, who had just received her BA English from New York University and was full of a particular brand of youthful idealism, dinner party pseudo-concern didn’t seem like enough.

“There was no public pressure about Darfur because the public didn’t have a personal connection with the issue,” says Sterne, bent over her MacBook at the WeMedia Game Changers conference. There she sat for three days in March ‘09 amidst an odd combination of old and new media folk, conducting interviews about the future of journalism with nary a glance out the windows at the lovely University of Miami campus. She is just shy of 5’11”, thin with brown hair and the sort of cute that makes it difficult to believe that she’s a web journalism geek. She doesn’t have the requisite pastiness of skin or the hunched back that suggests too many hours spent hunched over a keyboard, separating her from most of the new generation of journalists bred for the web.

But then you watch her interviewing old media devotees like the head of strategy at The AP, Jim Kennedy, and new media crusaders like Amra Tareen of citizen journalism site AllVoices.com and it becomes easier to imagine that even pretty girls can be obsessed with the internet and what it means for the future of the news. But unlike her pasty brethren, Sterne is just as comfortable in front of the camera as behind. She uses her interviews not only as a means of grilling, say George Brook, international editor at The Times of London, about the Times’ audience interaction on the web, but also to flirt a bit and push citizen journalism into every conversation. Whether it’s intentional or not remains unclear, but Sterne also does a bit of hair flipping in the midst of questions like “do you see opportunities for citizen journalists to fill the gap in your foreign coverage?”

More than 50 of the conference’s participants filtered through Sterne’s GroundReport-emblazoned interview site, answering a few questions and bantering for the camera before heading to the next panel discussion or workshop. As her interviewees returned to their discussions and debates about the future of the news though, Sterne calmly worked on streaming her new footage directly to GroundReport, putting together a real-time report on the conference.

Sterne founded GroundReport, an open source global news site that shares revenue with its far-flung network of 4,000 citizen reporters, in the Summer of 2007. The site’s professed goal is to democratize the media by making original, intelligent reporting possible for amateurs and professionals alike. More importantly, in a world obsessed with “monetizing content,” GroundReport produces international news at a fraction of the cost of the mainstream media by relying on the locals for coverage.

So let’s say that you’re living in Congo, a riot breaks out, and you’re overcome with a need to spread the news. You start by creating a profile and, if you’re feeling creative, uploading a picture, too. Your profile tells readers not only how long you’ve been writing, how often you write and how much money you’ve made, but also serves as an archive for all of your past contributions. And once the riot is over and you have a minute to work on your GroundReport profile, you can also upload a bio detailing any qualifications or associations that might influence your coverage. Once you’ve started your profile, you are free to upload any original copy or multimedia content you like about the riot as long as there is original reporting involved. From there, a plagiarism filter flags copied content and the copy that makes it through the filter is checked over by GroundReport’s team of 30 Wikipedia style volunteer editors. If you are, in fact, a citizen journalist rather than a plagiarist, the editors correct grammar, translation foibles are rectified and your post is approved for inclusion in the site’s RSS feed.

If a particular story becomes popular enough, it is elevated to the front page. Both the hits and the star ratings are recorded on your profile, using up to 5 stars to mark you as a reliable or useless correspondent. Contributors are paid on a monthly basis according to the hits and stars their articles receive. Sterne says that earnings can range anywhere from a few cents to upwards of $200. Looking around the site though, it’s clear from the earnings field on various profile pages that the average GroundReporterer’s pay is much closer to the few cents side of the spectrum.

Though still in its infancy, the start up site has already garnered a lot of attention. Business Week recently named Sterne one of America’s 25 Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs and she has snared content partnerships with big names sites like The Huffington Post and Mogulus. And hardly a week passes without Sterne speaking on a panel about the future of the news—usually calm, collected and surrounded on either side by middle aged men who’ve been at this a lot longer than she has.