I want to acknowledge up front that I have some level of conflict of interest here, but I believe the subject is legitimately notable, and I'm hopeful that the community of Wikipedians will take the work I did gathering together a bunch of references, and improve the quality of the article. I mostly started with the subject's own writings directly, although I've already gone through and swapped out a few of those for better secondary sources. (And I'd also note that if you look at articles on "public intellectual" types, it is pretty normal that a lot of the article content will be referenced to the subject's own work. See Paul Krugman for instance. Tons of refs to his writing.)
I started up this draft because this is a person I'm acquainted with that I think is interesting/notable. As of today I've only met her in-person once, briefly, at a Commonwealth Club event a couple years ago where her sister Emily was speaking. Lara was attending the event with Chesa Boudin. I originally met Emily, years back, because I have a long-standing relationship with Slate magazine; I've been jokingly referred to as honorary staff. I'm not, like, close personal friends with any of the Slate folks, but I've met and chatted with many of them over the years, they send me free swag from time to time (like when they make a new t-shirt or whatever), and when they do live podcast recordings in SF I get comp tickets.
I would not have thought of her as being Wiki-level "notable" until relatively recently, but she has been the subject of significant news coverage over the last few years. Her work on exonerations has been covered in (at minimum, with the articles I found) the LA Times (two separate articles), the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the NYT Magazine (which granted that one is a little odd given it was written by her sister, but this was the cover story of one of the nation's most-read news mags), and the SF Chronicle. Her personal essays have also generated coverage, including both the various writers and shows that directly interviewed her, as well as "arm's length" coverage like this NYPost piece, which was evidently considered interesting enough to get re-published in Australia. --Auros (talk) 01:06, 1 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
Oh, also, I'll add that I used Emily Bazelon's article as a template for getting this one started, and copied some of the references from that, for, e.g. stuff like the family relationships. (If Emily is a cousin of Betty Friedan, you can infer that obviously Lara has to be as well.) I had to correct a couple glitches where I had copied stuff over and then forgot to edit. (Like I had the alma mater wrong on the first version, had to go back and tweak.) --Auros (talk) 01:11, 1 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
Also also, I'm not a super frequent editor, so I really appreciate other folks coming in to help improve this! Specifically, thank-you User:CatchedY. I'm actually a little surprised this got a second editor so quickly. :-) --Auros (talk) 01:20, 1 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
- Thank you! This is a really well written article. Is it ready for submission yet? CatchedY (talk) 09:47, 4 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
- Hi User:CatchedY - Sorry I'm just seeing this -- I actually hadn't been intending to submit it just yet, I was going to try to do another pass over all of the refs to try to replace some of the primary-source links with more secondary sources. But I guess it did get submitted, and I see the community gave it a C rating, which, honestly, seems fair. I definitely think it can still be improved! I will try to make time to go through the refs later tonight. Auros (talk) 17:54, 11 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
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