A former staffer at the New Yorker, Lemann is the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, where he currently supervises some 300 students and oversees the Columbia Journalism Review.

Lemann (pronounced "lemon") started his journalism career as a teenager, writing for an alternative paper in his hometown of New Orleans. After graduating Harvard (where he was president of the Crimson), Lemann joined the inside-the-Beltway journal The Washington Monthly, followed by stints at Texas Monthly and the Washington Post. In 1983, he joined the Atlantic Monthly as national correspondent. After a decade and half at the Atlantic, in 1999 Lemann was recruited by David Remnick to serve as Washington correspondent at the New Yorker, where Lemann also later began writing the "Wayward Press" column. In 2003, Columbia's Lee Bollinger tapped Lemann to head up the search committee for a new dean for the university's journalism school. Suitably impressed by his plan for beefing up the curriculum, Bollinger ended up picking Lemann for the position instead.

Lemann lives in Pelham with his second wife, Judith Shulevitz, a critic and author. (Shulevitz's mother, a rabbi, married the couple in 1999.) They live just five blocks away from Lemann's first wife, former House and Garden editor Dominique Browning. Lemann has two children from his marriage to Browning, Alex and Theo, and two children with Shulevitz.

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