Master's Teas

Paul Starr is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. At Princeton he holds the Stuart Chair in Communications and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School. He received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and Bancroft Prize in American History for The Social Transformation of American Medicine and the 2005 Goldsmith Book Prize for The Creation of the Media. His most recent book is Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health Care Reform. Professor Starr has written extensively on American society, politics, and public policy. In 1990, with Robert kuttner and Robert Reich, he co-founded The American Prospect, a liberal magazine about politics, policy, and ideas. He set out his interpretation of liberalism and its history in a 2007 book, Freedom's Power. Another book by Professor Starr, The Logic of Health-Care Reform (1992, reissued in a revised and expanded edition in 1994) laid out the case for a system of universal health insurance and managed competition. During 1993 he served as a senior advisor at the White House in the formulation of the Clinton health plan.

 

Liesel Pritzker Simmons is the Vice President and Director of Program Development for the IDP Foundation, Inc., a  private foundation with a mission to mobilize resources and strategic support to increase educational opportunities. Established in 2008, the IDP Foundation has supported and developed a wide range of programs in the education sectors most notably in the innovative IDP Rising Schools Program in Ghana, which leverages microfinance networks to empower low cost private schools with trainings and financial services. Liesel is a co-founder of Opportunity International's Young Ambassadors for Opportunity (YAO), a global network of young professionals who are passionate about microfinance. Liesel attended Columbia University, where she studied African History. Liesel is also a former child actreess. She starred in A Little Princess and appeared in Air Force One. She made her professional stage debut as Scout in a production of To Kill a Mockingbird in Chicago. She was also seen in Vincent in Brixton, and won a Theatre World Award for her performance.

 

Ian Brown is a roving writer for the Toronto Globe and Mail. He is equally well-known for his work on CBC Radio, where he was the moderator of Talking Books for more than a decade, an dalso hosted Sunday Morning and Later the Same Day. A graudate of the University of Toronto, he presents both The View From Here and Human Edge, two pre-eminent Canadian television documentary shows. He is the author of FreeWheeling, which won Canada's National Business Book Award; Man Medium Rare: True Adventures with North American Men; and The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son, about his disabled son, Walker, which won the 2010 Charles Taylor Prize and the Trillium Prize for nonfiction, and was named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011.

 

Cinco Paul is a screenwriter who (with his writing partner Ken Daurio) has written the screenplays for Despicable Me, Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who, Santa Clause 2, Hop, College Road Trip and Bubble Boy. He also wrote the lyrics for the songs in The Lorax, and recently turned Bubble Boy into a musical, winning both the ASCAP Sammy Cahn and Harold Arlen awards. He graduated from Yale in 1986 (as a member of Branford College!) and currently resides in southern California.