Articles 356

When an autonomous Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, Uber suspended its fleet of self-driving cars and assured everyone that it was “cooperating with authorities.” Such “cooperation”…

Although you would hardly know it today, Baltimore was once a city of streetcars. Crackling densely across the city’s center like fissures in old pavement and then sprawling thinly outward…

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…

[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…

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…

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…

The modern age, in almost every detail, began with the flat rejection of joy.  And the modern condition consists in alternately lamenting that there is nothing in which to take…

Nature stepped in in her wonted way and took complete control.

Oakland Township, MI My small, exurban farmstead is sustained, in part, by the relationship I forged with my local feed store. To help the reader appreciate the practical and economic…

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…

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…

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…

[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…

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…

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 (how often does The New York…

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…

[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…

The noise you are hearing is the furniture moving on the porch. You may have already noticed the redesigned site. Jeff Bilbro has taken the helm as Editor-in-Chief, replacing Jeff…

I’m honored and excited to be joining the Front Porch Republic in a more official capacity and taking over the editorial duties for this site. When I stumbled across FPR…

It's already an amazon dot hell best-seller in political theory.

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…

Hidden Springs Lane Al Franken is only the latest prominent man to be discovered as a lecherous cad if not an outright sexual predator. His behavior toward Leeann Tweeden when…

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…

I understood immediately why Skiles was a Spartan and I was not.