Journalist, author, critic and essayist, Lewis Lapham is probably best known as the editor of Harper’s  magazine. Born in San Francisco and educated at Yale and Cambridge, Lapham wrote articles, essays and reviews for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, National Review , Life , Fortune , Vanity Fair  and many others. He was editor of Harper’s  from 1976-81 and again from 1983 to the present. He wrote the introduction to MIT’s new edition of McLuhan’s Understanding  Media  in 1994.