About the Author
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Isabel Paterson |
Isabel Paterson is the pen name of Willy Stern, a retired journalist and teacher with a delightfully dysfunctional career. Stern was an investigative reporter at the Nashville Scene when it still had sex ads; he wore blue jeans and won a bucket load of national/international journalism awards there. Stern is also a former staff writer at Forbes and Business Week; he wore Brooks Brothers suits there and picked up maybe two awards. When he left Business Week for the Nashville Scene, his New York-based editor termed the move “the most extraordinary example of downward Jewish mobility” he’d ever witnessed.
Despite almost failing out of college, Stern has taught at many schools of higher learning, including Williams, Carleton and Colorado Colleges, and Vanderbilt University Law School. He’s pretty sure that Vanderbilt knew that he lacked a law degree; just to be safe, let’s keep that on the down low. He has also taught often at more obscure schools, like University of Alaska’s Nome campus. Stern gives many speeches and occasionally convinces a group to pay him to spout his oddball opinions.
Willy Stern |
Stern's writings have been published in major publications that impress his parents' friends, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune, New Republic and Weekly Standard. He’s been more widely published in obscure media like Campus Monthly and The Southland Times. Despite being embarrassingly monolingual, Stern has managed to ply his trade as a journalist around the globe, from Tokyo to Kabul, from Reykjavik to Johannesburg, from Baghdad to Anchorage, from Tokyo to Jerusalem, and many points in between.
Sterns' students are oft’ shocked to hear he has degrees from Williams College and Harvard University. He is the founder of The Legion Fund, a charitable entity that supports the Green Beret unit at Fort Campbell, KY. Stern has two amazing kids. In his dotage, he prefers to stare at a lake at his tick farm in rural northern Wisconsin. Stern has run many trail marathons and only finished last in one. He concurs wholeheartedly with ee cummings that "nothing measurable matters."