News from the provinces is hardly all bad.

JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS. It’s been seventy years since John Steuart Curry unveiled his masterpiece murals on the walls of the Kansas State House.  Their anarchic depiction of my home land so upset some of the finer muckety-mucks and Ladies’…

. . . we rediscovered the meaning of Place. Limits. Liberty.

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.

Harvey Mansfield and William Galston disagree about liberty; from the perspective that insists place empowers liberty, Galston has it right.

How about REAL Front Porches? Could FPR be the ultimate dating service?

Traver’s books bear the stamp of a true localist: admiration for independent people, a suspicion of government and “progress” (Traver opposed construction of the Mackinac Bridge, which men made to join what God had put asunder), and especially a pervasive anti-militarism.

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.

David Brooks on the meritocracy: good critique, bad conclusion.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

As the half-savage neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

If you go to the movies and look around you, what you see are people who are bored out of their minds. That’s why they’re there.

Men cut off from their origins and alienated from their selves become desperate, and desperate men do desperate deeds.

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.

If you walk the same route at about the same time every day, as I do, you develop a certain familiarity with the automobile culture that perfumes the public air. You can rattle off in your head the license plate of the red Ford coming your way, unless it’s that other red Ford, in which case you know that the driver, a somnambulant woman leaning into her steering wheel, mouth agape, is already, at this early hour, wearing her cell phone.

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.

Claremont, CA. They call it the “Superman Syndrome.” People who use methamphetamine often believe that they are capable of doing impossible things. Like flying. Or walking through walls. Or earning a living as a meatpacker in the era of…

Hamilton, Ontario. When remembering a family-owned grocery store in rural Virginia, a first image comes to mind, even though I did not actually witness it. This is my boss, a woman standing all of five feet tall, in the…