On March 8, New York Times best-selling author and award-winning journalist Rana Foroohar will interview Arthur Laffer and Robert Reich as part of New Albany’s Lecture Series presented by the New Albany Community Foundation.
Foroohar worked as a foreign affairs editor and foreign correspondent at Newsweek for 13 years where she was awarded the German Marshall Fund’s Peter R. Weitz Prize for transatlantic reporting. After her time at Newsweek, Foroohar became the assistant managing editor and economic columnist at TIME Magazine for six years. She’s received awards from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Affairs and the East-West Center, sits on the advisory board of the Open Markets Institute and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Foroohar is now a global business columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times and works as a global economic analyst at CNN.
Although Foroohar’s extensive credits speak to her skill in the field of journalism, this career was not always her goal.
“I was an accidental journalist, to be honest. When I went to Columbia University, I studied pre-med and … English. I decided medicine wasn’t for me and so I graduated and needed to get a job and ended up in magazines,” Foroohar says. “The thing that really stuck with me was the fact that, in this profession, you are able to wake up every day and be curious about something new. That is an incredible privilege.”
In 2016, Foroohar wrote her first book, Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business. She was inspired after she returned to the U.S. in financial crisis after working as a foreign correspondent in Europe. Her experience as a journalist and economic writer gave her a fresh, global perspective on a rising problem.
Foroohar has since written two more books, Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles – and All of Us, published in 2019, and Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World, published in 2022. After publishing her first book, Foroohar became a columnist at Financial Times.
Between being an author, editor and column writer and making regular television, radio and podcast appearances, Foroohar is also a mother and a wife. On the morning of her interview with Healthy New Albany, she woke up at 5:45 a.m. to get on a conference call with a company in London at 6 a.m. Then, she made lunch for her 16-year-old son before sending him to school. Despite her packed schedule, Foroohar still prioritizes her health through exercise, meditation, breathing exercises and chanting.
“Exercise has always been super-duper important to me – it’s like brushing my teeth, I can’t function without it. I consider it something that is non-negotiable,” Foroohar says. “If I am working so hard … where I can’t work out for two or three days, I will feel it and my productivity will go down, so I make a real effort and I make no apologies.”
Foroohar’s commitment to regular exercise is what allows her to show up fully, day in and day out.
“I feel like I have a finite number of hours in a day where I can be productive. So if I am going over, I am less productive; whereas, if I am actually investing that time in taking care of myself, I am more productive,” she says.
Foroohar shares that meditating twice a day for 15-20 minutes and doing chanting exercises allows her to reframe her work day.
“It’s really easy … to get your head so into what you’re doing that you forget there is a bigger world out there,” she says.
By meditating regularly, Foroohar maintains perspective about what she believes is truly important: friends, family and the great outdoors.
In 2008, when Foroohar returned from her work in Europe as a foreign correspondent, she attended a Kripalu yoga retreat in the Berkshires. At this meditation retreat, practitioners gave up coffee and alcohol and meditated for hours a day.
“It was interesting because I began to notice that all those substances – and even the ‘substance’ of business – were sort of like a scrim that had been lifted. I felt a lot more peace and focus and clarity and I really liked that feeling,” Foroohar says. “Now I talk with friends … who are serious meditators … and we sometimes meditate and chant together.”
Foroohar’s physical practice of yoga and meditation extends to improving her mental health by remembering to slow down instead of always pushing herself.
"I realized there were certain things my body could do but that I wasn't really mentally ready to do or emotionally ready to do, you know, standing on my head for example,” she says. “I could do it, but there was fear associated with it. I got some injuries related to that and it forced me to slow down and as I recovered, my impulse is always to do something, go see a doctor, do more exercise, do more stretching, and I finally, after traversing traditional medicine, alternative medicine, I found a practitioner of the Alexander technique.”
Observation and greater awareness of her body, through the technique, have proved helpful for Foroohar.
In March, Foroohar will head to the Jeanne B. McCoy Community Center for the Arts to moderate a conversation between former secretary of labor, Robert Reich, and former presidential advisor, Arthur Laffer.
“These are two folks that have very interesting perspectives on the last few decades of economic history,” Foroohar says. “They are coming from different political angles but they’ve both been witnesses to history and have shaped history in a lot of ways.”
Foroohar says she looks forward to discussing modern issues and hear Reich and Laffer’s thoughts on the state of the national and global economy.
“We are really at an economic pivot point,” she says. “A lot is changing in the global economy, in national politics, in society and technology, so I am definitely looking to help … tease out where we’ve been, where we’re going and what that’s going to mean for countries, companies (and) communities.”
The Speakers
Robert Reich
Secretary of labor during the Clinton administration and named one of the 10 most effective
cabinet secretaries of the 20th century by TIME Magazine, Robert Reich is a best-selling author, economist and professor. In 2015, Reich founded Inequality Media. He is the co-creator of the award-winning documentaries Inequality for All and Saving Capitalism.
Dr. Arthur Laffer
Arthur Laffer is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and served as an adviser to Ronald Reagan during his presidency. He is a renowned economist and is known for the development of the “Laffer curve” economics concept. Laffer is also an author and founder of Laffer Associates.
Katie Giffin is a contributing writer at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
