About Me
What I do
My name is Sarah Stein Lubrano and I am a writer and researcher. My writing focuses on social and political life and its relationship to psychology. My first book, Don’t Talk About Politics, was released in 2025 and argues that “debate” and “the marketplace of ideas” do not function in practice. Instead two other key factors change people’s minds throughout their lives. Because of this, modern societies need to rapidly reverse the decline in democratic infrastructure that has limited people’s political agency. It was both positively reviewed by the Daily Mail (no link!) and featured in the London Review of Books podcast.
My next book, currently under contract, focuses on social atrophy and the misunderstood crisis of isolation and alienation in modern societies.
I write and speak publicly on a variety of topics. My public-facing thinking often happens through the Sense and Solidarity Initiative, a platform I founded with Max Haiven where people who want to radically change the world can learn together and build individual and collective capacity.
My speaking/lectures agent is: info@goliathjones.com.
I am also Head of Research for the The Future Narratives Lab, where our work focuses on narratives about social and political change. For many years I was the Head of Content at The School of Life in London, where I helped create some of the earliest YouTube videos for its now-thriving channel, which boasts over five million viewers. For that company and others, I have done research, writing, and design for everything from films to apps to interactive workshops. You can see a bit more about my past professional work with a variety of companies on LinkedIn. .
What I think about
I hold a DPhil in Political Theory from Oxford University, where I studied at the intersection of cognitive dissonance theory and critical theory. I have a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University. In earlier lives in and around the university system, I made films, and worked as a prison tutor, student welfare officer, and obituary writer.
I am particularly interested in critical theory for the 21st century, in infrastructure, interdependent reasoning, (reversing) social atrophy, (understanding) action-oriented reasoning and the future of the public sphere and public intellectual life.
I have also published about best teaching practices in legal education, and am working on a public history project on "polyam-ish" relationships with Bri Watson. You can see our work profiled in Forbes!