“Change you can believe in” has morphed into “a status quo you will bend heaven and earth to hold onto.” See it here.
The line isn’t rhythmic, but it packs a punch with its parallel prepositions–and, I’m afraid, its accuracy.…
July 2009
“Come in and look,” Quintín urged me, as he disappeared with a shuffle through the low doorway in his adobe house. I got up from the wooden bench on which I had been sitting on his small patio, and followed…
“Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing.”
–Nietzsche
Several years ago I heard a scientist being interviewed on NPR…
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY…—Caleb has proposed this beautiful rendition of “Our Town” by Iris DeMent as the Front Porch theme song.
(Anyone not moved by it is either dead or, worse, deracinated.) Herewith a few more tunes I would happily
Devon, PA.… No observer of American culture grasped its implicit contents better than did Alexis de Tocqueville, and no one since has better grasped its potencies as they have actually unfolded. Thus, for those with eyes to see, every
Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason, is one of my favorite writers on matters cultural and political. His fugitive essays for No Depression, the magazine of American music, have just been collected online at http://archives.nodepression.com/author/jesse-walker/. They include a superb defense of Bob…
Rock Island, IL…
The awning above the west-facing kitchen window is doing what it was made to do as the all-seeing July sun beats our cedar-shake siding like a red-headed step-child. I stand at the sink, looking out the window
Holland, MI.… I live in the only part of the country where the “V” section is the largest part of the phone book. When your landscape contains burgs with names such as Holland, Zeeland, Vriesland, Graafschaap, Drenthe and the like,
Devon, PA.… The Wall Street Journal reports one angle on what I just knew would become a controversy. If it were the New York Times reporting, one could safely expect the article would be an adoring contemplation of what
Phillip Blond
Irving, TX.… It has been sometime since I have called myself a “conservative.” It is not that any of my opinions have changed, but rather that conservatism forgot just what is was trying to conserve. Increasingly, it became,
Kearneysville, WV.… The debate, such as it is, between liberals and conservatives frequently centers on issues pertaining to that oldest of institutions, the family. On the one hand, there are those who insist that the so-called traditional family is merely
Cold Spring, N.Y. …In order to get people thinking rightly about economists, Fritz Schumacher used to tell the story of an architect, a priest, and an economist talking about which one had the oldest profession. The architect argued that his
“The more things change, the more they remain the same.” The villagers of Pomatambo, Ayacucho, Peru, did not coin the phrase, though it has captured their lives with eerie precision over the generations. In one sense, this “timeless present” has…
Henry County, Kentucky. …If your name is your fate, what does the future hold for Rylynn Shikaela Novaleigh?
There she is in the paper, age one, wrapped in the boa her mother chose from the photographer’s prop basket, a
In response to my posting on “‘A Distributist View of the Global Economic Crisis’: A Report,” several people asked for more specifics regarding the popssible shape of a contemporary Distributist public policy agenda. My address to the conference summarized such…
If you’re lucky enough to be near beautiful Allegany County, New York, over the weekend of August 7-9, drop by Alfred University to check out the New York Green Fest (http://nygreenfest.org). I’ll be speaking Sunday morning. The main organizer is…
