Alessandra Stanley is editor of Air Mail. Born in Boston and educated at Harvard, she began her journalistic career at Time magazine, and in 1994 she joined the New York Times, initially as a foreign correspondent, serving as bureau chief in Moscow and Rome. She became the paper’s chief television critic in 2003, and produced influential analysis of events from the finale of ‘The Sopranos’ to Russian TV coverage of Vladimir Putin’s re-election in 2012. Most recently, she joined Graydon Carter to launch Air Mail, a digital-first lifestyle newsletter reporting with “sophistication, authority and wit”. In this in-depth interview, she talks about bringing “poetry” to the newsletter format with illustrations and cartoons, discusses being a television critic during the format’s “golden age”, and describes the thrill of being an editor when an important and high-profile story emerges from your team.