BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY--Edward Abbey died twenty years ago today. A product of the perfectly named Home, Pennsylvania, son of the conjugation of a Woman’s Christian Temperance Unionist and a Wobbly farmer, Abbey was a hillbilly intellectual park ranger and...
JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS. Everyone here seems to pretty much agree that we are in a pickle. The symptoms are there for anyone to see. The root causes are perhaps more difficult to ferret out, and may be multiple and...
Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. This is not an argument for intelligent design. It is, however, an argument that creation is the only scientifically acceptable explanation for the existence of the universe. I do not mean that we can...
Devon, PA. Some years ago, early in my graduate student days in South Bend, I was invited to begin an opinion column in the campus newspaper, The Observer. The invitation came from one Peter Wicks, who had been publishing...
Phoenix, Arizona. Catapulted by his inclusion on the exclusive FPR blogroll, Ross Douthat has been tabbed as a new opinion columnist for the New York Times. This is good news. For one thing, it means that for the first...
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY. Via the University Bookman, herewith my introduction to its recent special issue on Regionalism, which featured contributions from Frank Bryan, Kate Dalton, Jeff Cain, Jeremy Beer, Jesse Walker, Sockless Caleb Stegall, Steve Lewandowski, Ragtime Dan McCarthy,...
RINGOES, NJ. The numbers keep rolling in. The Dow is below 7000. Unemployment is above 8%. In the fourth quarter of 2008, the economy contracted at a rate of 3.8%. This was less than some economists predicted, but such...
Claremont, CA. Here in southern California, local woman Nadya Suleman has been holding her own on the front pages, alongside arguably more pressing stories about the flailing economy.
It's easy to dismiss the fascination with "Octo-Mom," as the press...
He traveled the three miles to the mill 63 times during the 87th harvest of his life, his old International pulling the wagon my uncle filled with beans or corn. I don't know why he counted the trips; perhaps it helped pass the time and focus his wavering mind on something other than the pain. He said to my father that he wanted to bring in one last crop. He almost did, clearing the beans but only getting halfway through the corn before he swallowed hard and told my uncle that they had better hire another man.
RINGOES, NJ. Isn’t it interesting how quickly speculation becomes conventional wisdom? Back in the fall, when we began to hear rumblings of economic catastrophe, things were a bit vague. Most agreed that something was wrong. Some argued that the...