Virginia Postrel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Part of a series on
Libertarianism

Virginia I. Postrel (born 14 January 1960) is an American political and cultural writer of broadly libertarian, or classical liberal, views.[1]

She is best known for her non-fiction books, The Future and Its Enemies and The Substance of Style. In the former she explains her philosophy, "dynamism", a forward-looking and change-seeking philosophy that generally favors unregulated organization through "spontaneous order". She contrasts it with "stasis", a philosophy that favors top-down control and regulation and is marked by desire to maintain the present state of affairs.[2] In November 2013, she published a third book, The Power of Glamour, which defined glamour as "nonverbal rhetoric" that “leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.”[3]

Career

Virginia Postrel was editor of Reason from July 1989 to January 2000, and remained on the masthead as editor-at-large through 2001. Prior to that, she was a reporter for Inc. and the Wall Street Journal.[4] She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).[5] From 2000 to 2006, she wrote an economics column for the New York Times and from 2006 to 2009 she wrote the "Commerce and Culture" column for "The Atlantic".[6] (She also appeared on the last episode of the third season of Penn and Teller's Bullshit!.)

Postrel wrote the biweekly column "Commerce & Culture" for the Wall Street Journal until April 2011. Since May 2011, she has written a biweekly column for Bloomberg View.

Health care, bioethics, and aesthetics

Postrel has written several articles on health care and bioethics, including accounts of her own experiences.

In March 2006 Postrel donated a kidney to an acquaintance, writer Sally Satel.[7][8] She has recounted the experience, and referred to it in several subsequent articles and blog posts—many of which are critical of legal prohibitions against compensating organ donors. In some of these pieces she discusses strategies for working around these restrictions, such as organ donor transplant chains.[9][10]

In her March 2009 article "My Drug Problem" in The Atlantic, Postrel wrote about her own experience of being treated for breast cancer with the expensive drug Herceptin.[11][12] She questioned if such a costly treatment would be available to others and if the risky research that makes such innovative treatments possible would be profitable under proposed health care reforms in the United States.

Postrel has also referred to her experience as a cancer patient in her writing about the importance of design aesthetics in hospitals, and the competitive forces that drive them to create more attractive environments for patients.[13] This ties into the thesis of her second book—that beauty is more than simply a superficial, frivolous trait, and can go more than skin deep. Notions of beauty and desirability—and thoughts on what makes good design good beyond the needs of sound engineering—inform her work at the "Deep Glamour" blog.

On Tuesday, December 10, Postrel was the subject for critique on The Colbert Report for an opinion article written for Bloomberg.com titled, "Who Needs a Raise When You Have TV?"[14] On 15 November 2013, Postrel rankled commentators at libertarian Reason.com by referring to them in a Tweet as "jerks" on her Twitter account: "I hope no Reason commenters go on the cruise, because I don't want to meet these jerks."

Bibliography

  • The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, Free Press, (December 1, 1998) (ISBN 0-684-86269-7)
  • The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, HarperCollins, September 2003 (ISBN 0-06-018632-1)
  • The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion, Simon & Schuster, November 5, 2013 (ISBN 978-1416561118)

See also

  • List of notable organ transplant donors and recipients

References

  1. ↑ Postrel, Virginia (2007-03-18). "An 18th-Century Brain in a 21st-Century Head". Cato Unbound. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  2. ↑ "The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel". Dynamist.com. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  3. ↑ Silber, Kenneth (2013-11-01). "Review: The Power of Glamour." Quicksilber. Retrieved 2013-11-07.
  4. ↑ "Virginia Postrel's bio". Dynamist.com. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  5. ↑ "Board of Directors - The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education". FIRE. 2003-12-19. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  6. ↑ "Virginia Postrel - Authors". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  7. ↑ Shlaes, Amity (2006-03-15). "I Would Give My Left Kidney to Prove I'm Right: Amity Shlaes". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  8. ↑ Sally Satel. "Desperately Seeking a Kidney". Nytimes.com. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  9. ↑ "Virginia Postrel on donating a kidney". Dynamist.com. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  10. ↑ Virginia Postrel (2009-07-09). "With Functioning Kidneys for All - Virginia Postrel". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  11. ↑ "My Drug Problem". Theatlantic.com. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  12. ↑ Virginia Postrel (2009-03-30). "Defending "My Drug Problem" - Virginia Postrel". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  13. ↑ Virginia Postrel (2008-04-01). "The Art of Healing - Virginia Postrel". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2013-10-01. 
  14. ↑ "Who Needs a Raise When You Have TV?". Bloomberg.com. 2013-12-02. Retrieved 2013-12-10. 

External links

Authority control
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.