The Barbershop 250

"In order to implement vital system updates, you must install the Trans-Mog-Z Facilitator, available at any Big Horizon Automotive Intervention Center. This has been your first notice.”

Hillbilly Elegy is indeed political, but in a deeper sense, entangled as it is in the webs of broken promises and repeated forgiveness.

Whatever our color or life or place of origin, we can all sing of our longing for home, our love of the natural world, our delight in children, and our…

We need to reject the myth of Progress that discourages us from ever being settled and content.

The sins of the movers may be visited upon their children, but it’s possible for the children to suffer well the consequences of their parents’ and grandparents’ decisions.

Training for a triathlon roots you to the environment, economics, and people of a particular place.

Intentional community stands as a powerful rebuke to the modern pursuit of the good life: it is not by restlessly seeking to improve our circumstances, but by committing ourselves to…

Why does Shakespeare offer us love instead of politics? Love is intimate. Love is about attachment. Love is about beauty. Love is local.

While there are so-called “flyover” states, there is also a “flyover” state of mind. A road trip can help us leave that behind.

Before I begin to complain about the shortened season, the lack of travel to the usual hubs, the lack of live fanhood, it might be well to remember those who…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Recently, Tablet Magazine published a lengthy essay by Eric Kaufmann, heralding the revival of "left-conservative" thinking, which the author defined as "a conservative view on…

Lana Del Rey. Wendell Berry. Stephen King. Singer-songwriter. Poet-novelist-essayist farmer. Horror writer. What brings these three seemingly disparate artists together in my imagination? Hope.

No man is an island, and everything we do, even in the privacy of our homes, has an effect on our society as a whole, but the past three months…

Flânerie is a kind of silent revolt. The chief virtue in an industrial society is efficiency, but by its very nature, flânerie is inefficient. It doesn’t even pretend to care…

Chuck Marohn's work, whatever disagreements one may have with it, gives us some good counsel on where to start changing suburban-addicted minds and fiscal incentives.

I worry about our ever-expanding cult of safety and nod in agreement with so much of sociologist Frank Furedi’s description of the “Paradox of our Safety Addiction.” He argues that…

We have been thrown back into our own small worlds, but these are worlds we are free to shape. Within the household we have considerable power over how our lives…

Why have we persisted in peeing outdoors well after the advent of outhouses and toilets?

True, there is much on offer in the world more exciting than tromping around on the muddy bank of a creek in the middle of nowhere. I’m unlikely to convince…

Front Porch Republic readers all adhere in some ways to principles that are good and true and beautiful: local authority, productive work, and community involvement. Simply fighting against government action…

Says here malaria treatments work on COVID-19.

To be isolated from one another, and in particular from those third places where the rich possibilities of community are most regularly realized strains urban interdependence as nothing else.

You just do it, and you do it because you know your place is a wonderful place and you want to keep it the way it is. It’s not because…

I’m inclined to believe that both the species and individuals, that both mankind in general and you and I in particular, benefit from the occasional reality check..