It’s the Land, Stupid
I'll take the old gal with a few well-earned wrinkles that fit soft and snug like a favorite glove. It's the land, stupid, and boy is she a thing of stunning beauty.
Place, Limits, Liberty (In That Order)
Harvey Mansfield and William Galston disagree about liberty; from the perspective that insists place empowers liberty, Galston has it right.
Constitutional Kookiness
For years, two-faced Republican demagogues have served up phony-baloney about how much they love little country churches, Norman Rockwell paintings, and old-fashioned American life, even while they were simultaneously encouraging government-subsidized corporations to steamroll Mom & Pop businesses and turn main streets into chain-store strip-malls.
Friendship with New England Reserve
As the half-savage neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Blood and Tobacco: Robert Penn Warren’s “Night Rider”
Men cut off from their origins and alienated from their selves become desperate, and desperate men do desperate deeds.
From Olive Trees to Overcapacity
A homogeneous global consumer culture flattens its victims. And, perhaps in the same vein, our meanderings around the dying furniture capital of Yecla turned up nothing: virtually everything on display fitted what has become the decorative style of contemporary Spain: the sort of stuff one might find in a Copenhagen dentist’s office.
The Roots of Originality
It is only our own town or neighborhood that is specific enough, and someday knowable enough, to enable a capable writer's imagination to imagine it clear and whole.