Articles 356
So Long, Leonard Cohen
One of the pleasures of living near the Canadian border is Canuck radio, which due to local content regulations (the good protectionism) plays a steady diet (varying greatly in nutritional…
Dear Millennials: We Hear You, But Can We See You?
Columbus, OH I woke up on Wednesday morning with an Election Day hangover: groggy, head pounding, despondent, a little nauseous. I stumbled out of bed and refreshed the news app…
The Triumph of “Buchananism”
Although President-Elect Donald Trump may have been insincere, when he insisted that he was only the "messenger" and not the personal cause of his sudden rise to political prominence over…
Sources of Order: Rooted Cosmopolitanism and the Origins of City Life
What follows is an expanded version of a talk originally given at the 2016 Front Porch Republic Conference at Notre Dame, where Susannah Black spoke on a panel on Promoting…
Professor-in-Chief
After the second, town hall-styled presidential debate pundits raved, and perhaps rightly so, about Hilary Clinton’s ability to handle the format. The former first lady received high rankings from observers…
Election Reflections, 2016 (Part 1)
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] With the exception of one big think piece on our almost-certainly-soon-to-be-POTUS, Hillary Clinton, I've been quiet this presidential election. I think that's because, in the…
Trump in Context
Sioux Center, Iowa. In what he represents, Donald Trump is not as unique as either his admirers or his despisers think. How do we explain the Trump phenomenon? When he…
Patmore: Prophetic Political Pessimist (and Localist?)
“Nations die of softening of the brain, which, for a long time, passes for softening of the heart.” “Democracy is only a continually shifting aristocracy of money, impudence, animal energy…
Dy-No-Mite!
Minnesota's second literary Nobelist is the subject of The Political World of Bob Dylan: Freedom and Justice, Power and Sin, a perceptive book by our porchite colleague Jeff Taylor. Herewith…
Twenty Years Now, Where’d They Go?
The Future of Freedom Foundation has reprinted "The Empire versus Little America," my speech from what was, in a parallel universe, the epochal 2010 conference that begat the peace group…
Mr. Maturen Goes to Washington
Queens, NY Many of us have, I imagine, indulged over the course of this summer in a certain amount of GOP doomer porn-- reading (and writing, and talking about)…
Walker Percy and Modern America: A Message from the Ruins
Earlier this year, several publications celebrated Walker Percy’s 100th birthday. However, for the most part, the occasion went largely unnoticed. Although Percy is still well regarded in many circles, most…
Bill Kauffman on Why We Don’t Need a President
Only the Anti-Federalists, it seems, could envision Lyndon B. Johnson or George W. Bush.
The Alpine Heart
Liechtenstein is the 6th smallest country in the world, larger than San Marino but smaller than the Marshall Islands, and is roughly twice the size of the island of Manhattan.…
Going Down to Vanity Fair
Over a long and colorful career, the phrase “Vanity Fair” has called up wildly divergent associations, while often seeming to mean nothing at all. Is it a place? A quality?…
From The Multiversity Cave: Conclusion
Saginaw, MI This is the final post of a series that explored what prominent thinkers can teach us about today’s public multiversity, the modern university with its many colleges, departments,…
Giving Thanks for Russell Kirk’s Long Shadow
And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate —but there…
Would Rabbit Angstrom Vote For Trump?
Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star with a spiritual yearning and an outsized libido, may be both John Updike’s most famous and most despised literary character. But…
Agrarian Fireworks
If you’re like me, holidays leave you feeling unusually contemplative, I suppose because the everyone-is-doing-it mentality awakens in us the long-slumbering cultural anthropologist. Holidays cause me to wonder why, exactly, we do what we do…
Who Are Public Monuments For?
History is a lie. Or, rather, a complex galaxy of truths, half-truths, exaggerations, and downplayings that together form a narrative. We don’t write histories because we want to record what…
Gene, Everlasting (1932–2016)
For some time, I saw Gene Logsdon as a wiry bearded fellow in slouch hat and knee boots, striding purposefully across a field he was sowing by hand. That was…
The Day the Improbable Happened
In 2014, I was in Glasgow for the Scottish referendum. I had spent the day before the referendum out and about in Glasgow and the “Yes” for independence vote was…
The United Kingdom Votes “Localism”
When Front Porch Republic came into the world seven years ago, it did so largely on the strength of an intuition. Everyone was weary of "bigness." The financial collapse triggered by the…