The Editors

Claremont, CA. Here in southern California, local woman Nadya Suleman has been holding her own on the front pages, alongside arguably more pressing stories about the flailing economy. It's easy…

He traveled the three miles to the mill 63 times during the 87th harvest of his life, his old International pulling the wagon my uncle filled with beans or corn.…

Those of you who didn't lose your life savings with Mr. Madoff, and who can think about him with equanimity, may be interested in a very fine novel about his…

  Alexandria, VA . The causes of the current economic collapse have been widely discussed and minutely explored.  However, to date I do not believe that I have yet seen…

Los Angeles, CA At the risk of copyright infringement, I want to recommend a song of this title by John McCutcheon which appears on his album Hail to the Chief. …

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY. Horton Foote, the playwright and screenwriter from Wharton, Texas, died last week at the age of 92. Foote, whose finest works include The Trip to Bountiful and…

ITEM: President Obama Calls for Longer School Day, Public Education for Toddlers, & the Abolition of Summer Vacation RESPONSE: The fire captain in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: “Heredity and environment…

JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS. William Allen White, the noted editorialist of Emporia, once named our shared home country America’s tenth muse—the muse of prophecy. If Kansas is muse, surely one of…

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. I appreciated Professor Deneen's discussion of the problem of free-riding, and I agree that ours is a precarious position, but I would suggest that it is also paradoxically…

'Tis the season to hie on down to the high school gym. Via First Principles, herewith my piece on Hoosiers, one of the precious few good films ever made about…

Well, we are all localists here, watching our national economy stagger and moan.  Is there any room for a conversation about local economies? What would a local economy mean? One of…

Alexandria, VA A few nights ago in Washington D.C., Wendell Berry was among the speakers at what turned out to be a pep rally for opponents of global warming.  They…

E.D. Kain identifies a paradox in modern American conservatism that will be familiar to students of George Grant. Forty years ago, Grant wrote this in his essay, "In Defence of…

CLAREMONT, CA. We have become homeowners. This week, my husband and I are moving boxes from our latest rental into a house that we may finally call home. It’s a…

JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS. In the comments somewhere below, Prof. Fox mentions the regional artist John Steuart Curry. A fitting topic for my first foray into this space, not only because…

We do live in a remarkable age. The last time agrarianism and distributism were taken seriously in America was during the 1930s. The economic crisis of that decade forced people to…

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY. It’s town meeting day in the once and future republic of Vermont.  Herewith, from the American Conservative, my profile of Frank Bryan, the University of Vermont professor…

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. Via Derbyshire, this Terry Teachout column makes an important observation that relates back to Derbyshire's criticism of the influence of talk radio and my post on community: The information…

ALEXANDRIA, VA. Names are important, and few can be more significant than what a new publication calls itself. Perhaps at first greeting the name will give pause, causing the new…

PHOENIX, ARIZONA. I don’t think that many reviews have yet appeared, but John Lukacs has just published another memoir, titled Last Rites. Patrick Allitt has an appreciative, but not uncritical,…

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. E.D. Kain had a fine quote from Wendell Berry that provides a good definition of community to start any discussion of place and limits: A community is the mental…

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NEW YORK. March came in like a frigid lamb, and even though the temperature never did climb out of the teens the snowless patch in our backyard was…