Articles Archive

Several times lately I’ve opened my email and found notices about people who want to friend me, but I don’t think that means they want to befriend me. Thanks to…

George Will has penned an end-of-year pick-me-up for conservatives, counseling them that the likely prospect of Republican Presidential electoral defeat in November (given their sad slate of potential nominees) ought…

Here is an article describing how Kansas is leading the way toward a less centralized future. The “revolution in a cornfield” that is happening today in Gov. Sam Brownback's Kansas…

Some friends and I are celebrating the good news that one of our company was expecting another child. None of us are the Duggars, and the offspring of the three…

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY---Our daughter will be spending the snowy months rehearsing her role as Marian the Librarian in her high school’s production of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” that tuneful…

Porch readers will be interested in the new online symposium on distributism that is now on ANAMNESIS, A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and 'Things Divine.' This includes…

In this essay, former Wall Street Investment Banker, Michael Thomas, expresses his frustration and disillusion with our current economic system. His credibility comes from three decades on Wall Street. In…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] As Christmas and the end of 2011 approaches, I find myself thinking gratefully about what Leroy Hershberger has enabled my students and me to learn…

This Christmas--like last Christmas, and the one before that , and the one before that....--hundreds of thousands of our countrymen and women are far from their homes and families, fighting…

I’ve just finished Andrea Wulf’s beguiling book entitled “ Founding Gardeners, The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation”. Published this year by Knopf, it delves into…

In this season of the "holidays," it was announced several days ago that Fairfax County schools would be permitted to install video surveillance cameras in High Schools. Fairfax County is…

Devon, PA. We face only two feasible policies in America's engagement with the world.  We can seek to be a bomb-throwing hegemon until the money, and the credit, and the bodies, run…

We are at a turning point, according to McKibben. The era of the big and few is being replaced by a new era of the small and the many. Take…

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what he saw in a plain way …” John Ruskin I do not…

Give me smartassery. Give me a yawning match.

I am angry with my friend; he has betrayed a secret of mine perhaps, or maybe instead he has formed an intimacy with persons he knows to be my enemies. …

The Euro is in trouble, and the news just keeps getting worse. There is now open talk of a post-Euro Europe, and such a turn would be a serious strike…

Burned-Over District, NY---I’m reading Charles J. Shields’s absorbing new biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes, and while its morose subject deservedly never won Father or Husband of the…

At long last The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry is available. This volume, published by ISI Books and co-edited by Nathan Schlueter and yours truly, includes sixteen original essays on…

Queens, NY -- The idea was to design an English village from scratch, within railroad-commuting distance of Manhattan.  It was meant to include homes for families of different income levels,…

Do we get an economy that serves the people? Or do we get the right people to serve the economy?

One pernicious aspect of our age is its commitment to techne, the quasi-religious belief that all manner of things shall be made well with the right tool, expertise, specialist, or…

My latest book was cited as an "authority" before the Supreme Court in Florida v. HHS, the "Obamacare" case. You can read the brief here, if you are bored. This…

When next you stumble into the corner video store: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/redford-goes-ron-paul/