The Editors
Articles by The Editors
A Tale of Two Tragedies
This past week, the Baton Rouge district attorney announced he would not press charges against the two police officers who shot and killed Alton Sterling when attempting to arrest him.…
An Invitation to Caleb’s Porch
Those of us who have been around Front Porch republican for a while will remember the trenchant, funny and (in my opinion) only occasionally incorrect musings of Caleb Stegall, Esquire.…
Education and the Quest for Association
Plato remarked in the Republic that if one wanted to know the health of a city, we could simply look at the souls of its citizens. In conjunction with Aristotle,…
College and its End(s)
“College and its End(s)”---that was the title I had given to the section of senior seminar I taught this past fall. The class was conceived with two animating questions in…
The New Yorker’s Latest Contribution to Trumpian Populism
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. --George Orwell, Animal Farm This past Thursday, I opened my mailbox and saw a naked President Trump staring…
Identity and Ethnos in Socrates’s Athens: A Response to Jordan Wales
Jordan Wales has recently gifted the conservative movement a sober and justly-timed critique of Richard Spencer and the alt-right. Unfortunately, much of the analysis of Spencer and the movement Spencer…
Communal Self-Reliance: A Tie to Bind Black and White
Two recent incidents have made clear to me how the culture wars can stultify the fecund complexity of our common life. Recently, my wife and I attended a lecture on…
Learning from The Left Behind
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Robert Wuthnow's new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, is the best book I've read on the rural-urban divide in the…
The Practice of Attachment and A Comprehensive Social Order
Shortly after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla took to the pages of the New York Times to offer an edifying perspective as to why…
Reading Chatwin in Silesia
When I moved to Poland it was the first time I had left Britain. I have lived in the same town for four years and a month. Tarnowskie Góry is…
Reviewing Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
Taking up a craft—such as knitting, woodworking, or gardening—restores focal practices, re-connects us with the physical world, and provides the satisfaction of self-reliance. These benefits are good news to a…
Good News and Bad News
As always, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. On the good side of the ledger, the facts seem incontrovertible: more and more people riding bikes when they decide…
Captioning Over our Grief
In the spirit of Oscar season, we do well to look back at what the 2017 ‘Academy’ ignored. One such film is this fall’s Wind River, the directorial debut of…
Prairie Fires and Prairie Romances
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Caroline Fraser's wonderful Prairie Fires is many things. Primarily it's a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the justly famous Little House books, and…
Love the Evangelist, Not the Evangelism
Most of the reactions to Billy Graham's death yesterday have been, as you might expect, positive, which is welcome considering the way every day brings some news of how hypocritical…
Letter from the Electronic Jail
From a jail cell in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. charged us to acknowledge our “inescapable network of mutuality.” Fifty-five years later, our networks of mutuality remain inescapable. And they’re…
Urban Questions (and Responses) for Krugman
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Over a month ago, Paul Krugman used his space at The New York Times to ask "what, in the modern economy, are small cities even…
Catalonia Could Happen Here
As a scholar of Regional and Place Studies and a historian of secessionist movements I believe Catalonia’s brand of separatism could come to the United States, and sooner than Americans…
A Call for a Politically Inclusive Classroom
Teaching Tolerance in a Time of Trump sounds like a short-course a firebrand professor might offer, though I mean it in a more comprehensive way than one might imagine. While…
As North Korea Goes Nuclear Far East Ambassadors Must Speak Up
I lived much of my adult life under Terry Branstad’s multiple tenures as governor of Iowa, and I think he did a “pretty fair job,” as farm families are wont…
Breaking Through the Screen Door: The Jayhawks’ Hollywood Town Hall, Twenty-Five Years Later
A couple of years ago my wife had a minor accident, the kind that results in an older car being mysteriously “totaled.” Before the man came to ferry our 2005…
The Dryers are Coming! The Dryers are Coming!
South Korea lives on the cutting edge of technology -- just ask the young smart-phone zombies that slowly roam the campus where I teach. On second thought, better to send…
Trump: America’s Father-in-Chief?
Donald Trump has been called many things in the press in the first six months of his presidency, yet the media have thus far missed his most overlooked calling card:…
Bruce Langhorne, RIP
Bruce Langhorne, best known as the inspiration for Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" but best loved (by me, anyway) for his extraordinary score for Peter Fonda's 1971 acid Western The…
