Managing Editor, Thinks Nathalie Lagerfeld is a writer and editor with extensive experience launching digital media projects. As Managing Editor at Hippo Thinks, she works with writers and researchers to create compelling and informative articles, blog posts, and other content for industry clients. Nathalie studied Comparative Literature at Princeton, where she completed independent work in French literature and film. She was also a fellow at the Princeton Writing Center, where she discovered her passion for helping others polish their prose. Later, she got her first taste of startup life as an editor at Groupon, where she helped launch the Groupon Guide, a blog of engaging lifestyle articles that drive traffic to the Groupon website. She found she loved shaping the voice and mission for a newborn editorial project—a love that eventually led her to join the staff at Hippo Thinks. When she’s not working for Hippo, Nathalie performs her first-person nonfiction essays at live lit readings around Chicago. Her essays and book reviews have been published in the Wilson Quarterly, Wunderkammer, and Story Club Magazine, and she also volunteers as a workshop leader and tutor at 826CHI, a writing tutoring center. Why I love working for Hippo: Like most editors, I love working with the written word, but the collaborative aspect of my job is equally important to me. I love that my job at Hippo connects me to talented researchers and writers who I can talk over plans and ideas with. It’s also exciting to be part of a new and expanding organization—I look forward to watching Hippo grow. My favorite academic work: Right now, definitely The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning by Maggie Nelson. It’s the subtlest piece of arts criticism I’ve read in the past several years. In another life, I’d be: A film critic, anthropologist, or interplanetary explorer. Aside from the mighty hippo, my favorite animal is the: Honestly, probably the raccoon. I was obsessed with them as a kid—my childhood collection of raccoon stuffed animals still takes up a lot of precious real estate in my parents’ basement.
