John Murdock
Host of Brass Spittoon
John Murdock is an attorney and globetrotting localist who worked for over a decade in Washington, D.C.; left the Capital Beltway to write from a family farmhouse deep in the heart of the Lone Star state; taught law in South Korea; and then rode the housing waves of Boise. In 2023, John left the crisp dry air of Idaho and returned to the stifling humidity of his native east Texas. His writing is catalogued at johnmurdock.org.
Articles by John Murdock
Matt Stewart on Wallace Stegner
Matthew Stewart, author of The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California, sits down (literally) with host John Murdock to discuss Stegner’s complicated relationship with the American West. …
Katharine Hayhoe Talks Climate Change
Katharine Hayhoe is a professor at Texas Tech and the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy. Her most recent book is Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing…
Is Joel Salatin the Problem? Reflecting on The Last Pig
My infrequent episodes of bringing death to animals have always taken an emotional toll on me. Making a weekly trip to the slaughterhouse for over a decade, as Comis did,…
Chuck Marohn on the Human Errors of Traffic Engineering
Chuck Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns and author of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, discusses streets, roads, “stroads,” and the perils of the American traffic system. A trained engineer himself,…
Common Good and Bad Ideas
By reducing the value of words and, hence, constitutions, common good constitutionalism seems even more likely to veer into the dangerous realm of personal preference-based decision-making. Many figures could be…
Principles Over Power: Lessons from Bush and Nixon
If there is to be the equivalent of a Reagan following President Biden, he or she will face a more difficult task than the one leaders faced in 1980. Reagan…
Poetry and Politics with A.M. Juster
Michael J. Astrue has earned degrees from Yale and Harvard. He had a long and distinguished legal career and held several government positions as well as leadership posts in biotech…
Will Hoyt‘s Ohio River Journey to the Middle Ages
Host: John Murdock Guest: Will Hoyt Will Hoyt, author of The Seven Ranges, discusses his journey along the Ohio River into the physical, historical and philosophical interior of the strip-mined…
Supply Chain Silver Linings: What Sam Walton, Ronald Reagan, and the Amish can Teach Us Right Now
With the supply chain tangled, we have what may be a brief moment to consider its flaws without being blinded by the glare of its surface efficiencies.
Joseph Loconte on the Imagination of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien
Front Porch Republic editor Jeff Bilbro sits down with Joe Loconte of The King’s College for a spirited discussion of the book-turned-film A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War. …
David Cayley on Illich and Institutions
Canadian radio broadcaster David Cayley pulls up a chair to discuss Ivan Illich, a renegade priest and professor who argued against schools, missionaries, and modern medicine. Cayley, author of Ivan…
Cartoon Sex Ed
For those who still stand by the essential limiting power of words, these are trying times. In an age when homosexuality is immutable but gender is fluid, things can get…