Contributors

Jeremy Lent is the award-winning author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning. A former internet company CEO, he is founder of the non-profit Liology Institute dedicated to fostering an integrated, life-affirming worldview. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Frank Lesser is an Emmy-winning writer for The Colbert Report who's also written for At Home with Amy Sedaris. He's the author of a humour book about sad monsters called Sad Monsters: Growling on the Outside, Crying on the Inside and the creator of an animated series about monsters in therapy called You're Not A Monster. He promises his next project won't be about monsters (but if it is, they'll be happy this time).

Toby Lester is a contributing editor to The Atlantic and the author of The Fourth Part of the World (2009), which tells the story of the map that gave America its name. Picked as one of the best books of the year by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and American Heritage, among other publications, the book received second prize in the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Program, and was shortlisted for the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize. Lester has written extensively forThe Atlantic on subjects that include the sociology of new religions, the attempt to reconstruct ancient Greek music, the revisionist scholarship of the Qur'an, the struggle to change alphabets in Azerbaijan, and the chance harmonies of everyday sounds. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and three daughters.
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Sarah LeVine and Robert A. LeVine have collaborated for forty-seven years and have written two previous books, Child Care and Culture and Literacy and Mothering. Sarah is an anthropologist who has conducted research on four continents and coordinated the fieldwork of the Project on Maternal Schooling. Her books include Dolor y Alegria, Mothers and Wives, and The Saint of Kathmandu.

Marc Levinson is a former finance and economics editor of The Economist. He was previously a senior writer at Newsweek and more recently spent 10 years as an economist with JPMorgan Chase. He has published widely on economic subjects in such journals as Harvard Business Review and Foreign Affairs, and is currently senior fellow in international business at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Dr David Lewis read for a doctorate at the Department of Experimental Psychology, at the University of Sussex.

After qualifying as a clinical psychologist and psychopathologist, that is someone who studies mental illness, he founded a registered UK charity to help people with stress and anxiety problems. More recently he set up a not-for-profit website, from which he provides free guidance and answer questions sent in by visitors.

Over the past years, he has published more than 30 books on psychological topics, most of which can be purchased from Amazon or Amazon resellers. He has also appeared in numerous television and radio programmes on psychological and medical topics, including Secret Eaters and Embarrassing Bodies (Channel 4).

He lives near Brighton on the south coast of England and is chairman of Mindlab International, an independent research laboratory based at the University of Sussex.

Heather Lewis is the author of three novels: Notice, House Rules and Second Suspect. In 2002, she took her own life at the age of 40.

Jemima Lewis is a weekly columnist for the Telegraph, and the former editor of The Week.

Beth Lewis was raised in the wilds of Cornwall and split her childhood between books and the beach. She has travelled extensively throughout the world and has had close encounters with black bears, killer whales, and Great White sharks. She has been, at turns, a bank cashier, fire performer, juggler, and is currently the Publishing Manager at Rebellion. The Rush is her fifth novel. She lives in Oxford with her wife and daughter.

Judith Leibowitz (1920-1990) was an American author and teacher of the Alexander Technique.

Judith Leibowitz was 14 when she was paralysed from the waist down with polio. After many months of immobilization she undertook an intensive regime of physical therapy and could then walk again with braces and crutches. She graduated from Brooklyn College with a major in biology. She started having lessons first with Alma Frank and later with Lulie Westfeldt. She then trained as a teacher with Lulie Westfeldt and qualified in 1949. She began teaching in 1952.

In the early 1950s she went to London and had six weeks of daily lessons with F. M. Alexander; she returned two years later for another course of lessons.

In 1964 Leibowitz co-founded the American Center for the Alexander Technique (ACAT) with Debborah Caplan, Frank Ottiwell, Joyce Ringdohl and Babara Callen. They started a teachers training programme of which Leibowitz was Director until 1981.

Leibowitz started teaching the Alexander Technique at the drama department of the Julliard School in 1968 and continued this work until a few weeks before her death in 1990. She also taught the Alexander Technique at other theatre schools, including The American Conservatory Theatre, Arena Stage, and the Guthrie Theatre.

Robert A. LeVine and Sarah LeVine have collaborated for forty-seven years and have written two previous books, Child Care and Culture and Literacy and Mothering. Robert is the Roy E. Larsen Professor of Education and Human Development, Emeritus, at Harvard University.