Suzannah Lessard was one of the first editors of The Washington Monthly from 1971 to 1974. She is the author of The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family. She was the winner of the 1995 Whiting Award and is a staff writer for the New Yorker. Her most recent article for The Monthly was New Worlds, a review of Robert Kaplan's brilliant book An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future. She is currently writing a book about living in a society committed to accelerating change, which she explores through changes in the American landscape in the last 50 years.