The Editors

Jon Stewart's take down of ACORN is quite funny, but as a friend of mine said this morning, the real story is that anyone is shocked or suprised by this…

Henry County, Kentucky. Last week here we buried our 97-year-old neighbor, a woman named Thelma Chilton Moody Clark.  Until this spring she had never been sick, “and I don't know…

Russell Arben Fox has treated us to his reflections of the recently concluded APSA annual meeting here. It would be surprising if there were anything as thematic as what he…

Rod Dreher says Pelosi is right to fret about political violence.  He argues that it is evil to "lead people to believe [Obama is] a socialist conspiring to install an oligar(c)hy to rule…

Norman Borlaug has died, and Joe Carter calls him the world's greatest unknown hero and says that "few men have ever done more good for the human race."  He links…

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece on Philip Rieff for the American Conservative. One of the themes of Rieff’s work on which I focused was his concept…

Via The American Conservative, a few thoughts on the land of three downs: www.amconmag.com/article/2009/oct/01/0050/.

made once again by Jesse Walker, in re the prez and the kids. He says here in about 400 words just about everything that needs to be and should be…

It has been a year since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the subsequent near-collapse of the international economic system followed quickly by the massive increase of (at least visible)…

This post is dangerously close to turf already claimed by Bill Kaufman and Jason Peters. But the appeal of Richard Russo is so strong that if FPR readers do not…

  Jefferson County, Kansas. The following is a short excerpt from a longer essay in the forthcoming book The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, co-edited by our own Mark Mitchell.  Mark…

Washington, Ct. In his wonderful 1974 book entitled The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk remarks upon the British and how they are able to "muddle through" periods of social…

A new semester begins at Georgetown and around the country, a delicious time of early Fall anticipation of possibility and the unexpected - at least until the second week of…

“Hontar:  We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus. Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world. Thus have I made it.” From The…

Wichita, KS I just returned from my near-annual pilgrimage to the American Political Science Association's annual convention...this year held, ironically enough, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I didn't mind--it meant I'd…

Ah, September.  The enervating heat of August is less, and school starts up again with all the hopefulness and energy of a new academic year.  I still feel the year…

We set up here on the porch six months ago today. Many words later, it's still a nice place to relax and shoot the breeze. To mark the occasion, a…

Claremont, CA. Tomato, the main character in Erika Lopez’s terrifically kooky Flaming Iguanas, loves the post office. She says, to be precise, that she has a “profound love for the…

Alexandria, VA I'm late to this, but have been spending the last few weeks of the summer break gorging on episodes of David Simon's acclaimed HBO series "The Wire." It…

This fellow has some nice things to say about what we've been up to here on the porch. So let me return the favor and thank him, first, for noticing,…

Washington, CT. The unanimously anointed Soothsayer of the American Republic, Alexis de Tocqueville is deservedly credited with divining the essential and lasting traits of the mythological American. That he did…

Our fellow Porcher Rod Dreher says Dick Cheney is an outlaw. Of course he is right, after a certain manner of speaking, and I have no particular comment one way…

Gretel Kauffman, 15, who is gonna be ten times the writer her old man ever was, reports from the magnificent Porter Farms on thebatavian.com: http://www.thebatavian.com/tags/porter-farms.