Adam Gopnik (born August 24, 1956) is an American writer and essayist. He is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker, to which he has contributed non-fiction, fiction, memoir, and criticism since 1986. He is the author of nine books, including Paris to the Moon, Through the Children's Gate, The King in the Window, and A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. In 2020, his essay "The Driver's Seat" was cited as the most-assigned piece of contemporary nonfiction in the English-language syllabus. Early life and education Gopnik was born to a Jewish family in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal. His family lived at Habitat 67. Both his parents were professors at McGill University; father Irwin was a professor of English literature and mother Myrna was a professor of linguistics. During a storytelling session for The Moth in 2014, Gopnik explained that his paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother fell in love with each other, left their respective spouses and married. Gopnik studied at Dawson College and then at McGill University, earning a BA degree in art history. At McGill, he contributed to The McGill Daily. He completed graduate work at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Gopnik studied art history and with his friend Kirk Varnedoe curated the 1990 High/Low show at New York's Museum of Modern Art. He later wrote an article for Search Magazine on the connection between religion and art and the compatibility of Christianity and Darwinism. He states in the article that the arts of human history are products of religious thought and that human conduct is not guaranteed by religion or secularism. Career The New Yorker In 1986, he began his long association with The New Yorker with a piece that would show his future range, a consideration of connections among baseball, childhood, and Renaissance art. He has written for four New Yorker editors: William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick. Gopnik has contributed fiction, humor, book reviews, profiles, and internationally reported pieces to the magazine. After writing his first piece for the magazine in 1986, Gopnik became the magazine's art critic. He worked in this position from 1987 to 1995, after which he became the magazine's Paris correspondent. In 1995, The New Yorker dispatched him to Paris to write the "Paris Journals", in which he described life in that city. These essays were later collected and