The Nightstand

Lauck is unambiguous that he is engaged in a project of “civic retrieval,” to “remind us of our ideals and how many battles we have already won” and promote the story of the old Midwest as “a hopeful signal to us all in this moment of democratic peril and doubt.”

At their best, local papers “help provide a common reality and touchstone, a sense of community and of place.”

The official scorekeeper for my sixth-grade baseball team was our catcher’s mom. Sometimes she couldn’t be there, and it would fall to our coach...

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.

The mighty cosmos of the modern economic order determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of...

Our best ally should not be a man or woman who lacks the aptitude to discern right from wrong...one should not draw unto himself or herself a companion like Lady Macbeth, for Lady Macbeth does not exercise virtue.

For Kaplan, when comparing two countries and asking why one has succeeded where the other has failed, what matters most is not national policies but “societal dynamics—the strength of the social glue, the nature of relationships across groups, and the role of social institutions.” These are things that manifest (or fail to manifest) at the local level.

When we see that beauty and imagination, rightly understood, are intellectual as well as affective, we no longer have to try to bridge some gap between imagination and reality.

When Donald Hall passed away last week the obituary in his local New Hampshire newspaper made clear what an exceptional and instructive life he...

Patrick Deneen’s new book, Why Liberalism Failed, is a manifesto in defense of place, limits, and liberty. And the amount of attention it’s received...