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.
The Book You Should Read This Year
Claremont, CA. They call it the “Superman Syndrome.” People who use methamphetamine often believe that they are capable of doing impossible things. Like flying....