Jan Alexander writes both fiction and non-fiction that reflects how globalism and technology are changing everything, in good ways and bad.

As a business writer and editor specializing in the intersection of economics and culture, the rise of China, and doing well while doing good, she has written for Institutional Investor, Strategy+Business, Robb Report, Forbes, Money, Worth, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek. She is a former senior editor at Strategy+Business magazine, senior writer at Institutional Investor, and features and opinion editor at Worth magazine. She has written about movers and shakers in the changing world including Bill Clinton, Ray Dalio, Jean Case, Sally Krawcheck, Henry Kravis, Muhammed Yunus. and the late Lester Thurow

Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization, a Leapfrog Press Fiction Prize semi-finalist, is her second novel. She is also the author of Getting to Lamma, a tale of an American woman’s adventures in post-Tiananmen China, and co-author of Bad Girls of the Silver Screen, a nonfiction book that examines the characterization of prostitutes in Hollywood films through the 20th century. (Film critic Elvis Mitchell called it “the definitive book on bad girls.”) Her book reviews, author interviews and short fiction have appeared in Neworld Review, the Chicago Tribune, 34th Parallel, Everyday Fiction, and Silver Birch Press.

Writing by Jan Alexander
Business Articles

Time to Care About Machines Displacing Workers

Business Articles
The environmental, social and governance movement is adding a “T” for technology. While at board meetings, Elaine Eisenman makes ...

American entrepreneurial powerhouse: Jean Case’s five principles for a transformational breakthrough

Business Articles
Why the business vanguard believes in fearless failure. Jean Case is a powerhouse. We’re talking at the Gramercy Tavern ...

No, the Luxe Markets Were Not Immune to the Government Shutdown—Here’s Why

Business Articles
“The shutdown has been one of many factors bringing prices of luxury real estate down.” Read the Full Story ...

Kentaro Toyama on Why Technology Alone Won’t Change the World

Business Articles
The University of Michigan professor believes that to solve human problems, human skill is needed more urgently than ever ...
Conversations with Authors

A History of Violence – A Conversation with Roxana Robinson

Conversations with Authors
Roxana Robinson has written six novels and two short fiction collections—plus her widely acclaimed biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Her ...

Is There a Place for Us Hipsters? A conversation with Andrew Martin

Conversations with Authors
All eras considered, the first half of the 2010s was a carefree time to be a young writer living ...

A Thousand Words With a Master Novelist – A conversation with Jane Smiley

Conversations with Authors
Jane Smiley is famous for writing novels that are a product of her curiosity and exacting research rather than ...

Do-it-Yourself Truths – A conversation with Kurt Andersen

Conversations with Authors
Kurt Andersen lives in a Brooklyn brownstone, and from the window of the room he uses as an office, ...
Books by Jan Alexander

Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization

Books
Born in a bleak outpost of Sichuan province, Ming finds an unexpected glimpse of the world beyond when she ...

Getting to Lamma

Books
One bicycle accident changes everything when the self-absorbed New Yorker Madeleine Fox literally runs into brash Shanghai dissident David ...

Bad Girls of the Silver Screen

Books
Hollywood has always loved prostitutes. And from the “white slaves” and vamps of the silent era to the stars ...