Well, we are all localists here, watching our national economy stagger and moan. Is there any room for a conversation about local economies? What would a local economy mean?
One of the false notions Wendell Berry tries regularly to expose is...
Alexandria, VA A few nights ago in Washington D.C., Wendell Berry was among the speakers at what turned out to be a pep rally for opponents of global warming. They struck me as an assemblage of D.C. cosmopolites, well...
SOUTH BEND, IN. Edmund Burke's reputation has suffered much among conservatives during the past few years. Russell Kirk, of course, held him up as an exemplary genius of the conservative mind, championing above all the spirit of the "moral...
E.D. Kain identifies a paradox in modern American conservatism that will be familiar to students of George Grant. Forty years ago, Grant wrote this in his essay, "In Defence of North America":
It may be inded that, like most...
CLAREMONT, CA. We have become homeowners.
This week, my husband and I are moving boxes from our latest rental into a house that we may finally call home.
It’s a big change, to live somewhere with a relative possibility of permanence....
JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS. In the comments somewhere below, Prof. Fox mentions the regional artist John Steuart Curry. A fitting topic for my first foray into this space, not only because the great Kansan's work exemplifies the populist spirit of...
Rock Island, Illlinois.
It’s a little-known fact that many of our finest writers owned time machines and paid frequent visits to the future. Furious John Ruskin (1819-1900), for example, that mad critic of industrialization, surely must have passed through the...
We do live in a remarkable age. The last time agrarianism and distributism were taken seriously in America was during the 1930s. The economic crisis of that decade forced people to think beyond the usual economic claims of capitalism and socialism/communism. The...
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY. It’s town meeting day in the once and future republic of Vermont. Herewith, from the American Conservative, my profile of Frank Bryan, the University of Vermont professor whose Real Democracy (2004) is the finest work ever...
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.
Via Derbyshire, this Terry Teachout column makes an important observation that relates back to Derbyshire's criticism of the influence of talk radio and my post on community:
The information age offers something for anybody: Survivor for simpletons, The Sopranos for...