Austin Stone

Five miles east of our little farm, across a valley that shelters the old Lincoln Highway, lies the Conkle farm. Mrs. Conkle achieved a level of fame back in the 30’s when she cooked up some ham an eggs for Pretty Boy Floyd, a Oklahoma citizen known to carry concealed weapons and make . . . . Continue Reading »

A maximalist, Mr. Luhrmann doesn’t simply want to rouse your laughter and tears: he wants to rouse you out of a sensory-overloaded stupor with jolts of passion and fabulous visions. That may make him sound a wee bit Brechtian, but he’s really just an old-fashioned movie man, the kind . . . . Continue Reading »

This is my first post as a member of the Postmodern Conservative team. By way of debut, I want to raise an issue we’ve alluded to but haven’t taken on directly. That’s the status of intellectuals, especially academics, in American conservatism. As Ivan points out , many critics . . . . Continue Reading »

    Thanksgiving is a holiday devoted to the virtue of gratitude which, one could argue, finds less than hospitable ground in the modern world. The Lockean position on nature, that it furnishes only worthless materials that gain value through an imposition of labor, could not be more . . . . Continue Reading »

Augustinian Christianity is clearly the foundation of what became the medieval and modern liberal traditions—the traditions that separated the person or the individual from all the monistic pretensions of either the (natural) philosopher or the city.  As the civic religionist Rousseau . . . . Continue Reading »

The peculiar modern obsession with celebrity voyeurism is typically unattractive but often instructive: one can argue that our preoccupation with fame signifies the persistant recognition of Aristotle’s magnanimity, albeit in a deformed version, against the regnant leveling tendencies of . . . . Continue Reading »

If memory serves I was sitting in sociology class, just after lunch, on this day forty-four years ago, when the loud speaker at the front of the class crackled. I leaned forward to the girl sitting in front of me, Patty Brennan, and whispered, "They’ve shot the president!" She . . . . Continue Reading »

While performing my bi-weekly survey of what the transhumanists are up to, I happened upon this little gem . From the abstract: Postgenderism is an extrapolation of ways that technology is eroding the biological, psychological and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary . . . . Continue Reading »

The sketch begins with one actor onstage, clearly getting ready for an acid trip, waiting for the drug to kick in. A second actor enters—his roommate who will be his guide. His first words are, "Did you take it yet?" Dialogue proceeds as the drug takes effect, with the first actor . . . . Continue Reading »

Rod quotes David Rieff, who writes in personally, and reflects: consumerism is Promethean knowledge and [ . . . ] the only alternative to it is economic catastrophe —- something only the most convinced of misanthropes could possibly welcome. Is he correct? Is the only alternative to being . . . . Continue Reading »