About Virginia Postrel: Virginia Inman Postrel is an American political and cultural writer of broadly libertarian, or classical liberal, views.
By binding image and desire, glamour gives us pleasure, even as it heightens our yearning. It leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.
Many different relationships among patients, doctors, and drugs are possible and desirable. As in so many other areas of life, the Internet encourages experimentation. Questionnaire-based pharmacies operate between the traditional prescription and ov...
The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inher...
The glamour of air travel - its aspirational meaning in the public imagination - disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace.
The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: tha...
Some of the higher price of L.A. real estate does reflect the intrinsic pleasure of living there, as I'm reminded every time I walk out my door into the perfect weather.
A standard 'well woman' checkup can last as little as 10 minutes, hardly time for any in-depth discussions.
I like kids, but I don't expect to have any of my own. I'm 40 years old and spend most of my time working. I'd be a terrible mother.
The glamour of twentieth-century air travel helped to persuade once-fearful travelers to take to the skies and encouraged parochial Americans to go out and see the world.
Socialism is about claims of justice, and it is also about money: about wealth, income, physical and financial capital. It is an ideology based on allocating economic resources. It may try to achieve that goal by nationalizing assets, by command-and-...
Neon signs don't consume much power, but they look like they do. A cousin of fluorescent lighting, neon is actually quite energy efficient. A neon tube glows coolly when high-voltage, low-amperage electrical power excites the gas within it.
Even before Sputnik, scientists and policy makers worried that not enough Americans were studying science.
Science is about exploring the unknown and cannot offer guarantees.
In post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, skeptical voters demand full disclosure of everything from candidates' finances to their medical records, and spin-savvy accounts of backstage machinations dominate political coverage.
The growth of medical expenditures in the U.S. is not caused by administrative costs but by increases in the technical intensity of care over time - a.k.a. medical progress.
Scientists appear most often in horror movies. Through childlike curiosity or God-defying hubris, they unleash destructive forces they can't control - 'Forbidden Planet's Monsters of the Id.
The elements that create glamour are not specific styles - bias-cut gowns or lacquered furniture - but more general qualities: grace, mystery, transcendence. To the right audience, Halle Berry is more glamorous commanding the elements as Storm in the...
Most of us cluster somewhere in the middle of most statistical distributions. But there are lots of bell curves, and pretty much everyone is on a tail of at least one of them. We may collect strange memorabilia or read esoteric books, hold unusual re...
Barack Obama has brought glamour back to American politics - not the faux glamour-by-association of campaigning with movie stars or sailing with the Kennedys, but the real thing. The candidate himself is glamorous. Audiences project onto him the pers...
Glamour invites us to live in a different world. It has to simultaneously be mysterious, a little bit distant - that's why, often in these glamour shots, the person is not looking at the audience, it's why sunglasses are glamorous - but also not so f...
The common intuition is that e-books should be cheap because they aren't physical - no printing, no shipping.
