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Virginia Postrel


American
January 14, 1960
Writer
sunset beach sea abendstimmung
Dialysis does not make patients well. It simply postpones their deaths.


Virginia Postrel
Tags: Make Well Does
Even before Sputnik, scientists and policy makers worried that not enough Americans were studying science.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Science Were Even
Habituation is indeed a fact of human psychology. That's one reason we like novelty, including different cuts of jeans.
Virginia Postrel
A standard 'well woman' checkup can last as little as 10 minutes, hardly time for any in-depth discussions.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Time Any Well
The evergreen story of people in debt becomes even sexier in an economic downturn, when debts inevitably get harder to pay.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: People Get Even
The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting - a zoo, not a natural habitat.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Were Many Art
The intimate contest for self-command never ends, and lifetime happiness requires finding the right balance between present impulses and future well-being.
Virginia Postrel
Apocalyptic fiction, while ultimately about God's purposes, usually portrays an immediate, human world of competing conspiracies. Whatever happens is orchestrated, coordinated and planned in advance.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: God About World
The low point for neon came in 1982, when Holiday Inn did away with its signature 'Great Sign,' replacing the neon extravaganza with a forgettable green plastic box.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Great Did Away
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.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Time Like Most
Our eyes and brains pretty consistently like some human forms better than others. Shown photos of strangers, even babies look longer at the faces adults rank the best-looking.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Like Our Than
Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel pressure to fake it, at least in public. Nobody wants the stigma of being thought poor.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: People Want Being
Rising living standards - whether in a village, a region, a nation, or the world - depend first on specialization: on letting people concentrate on what they do best and trade with others who specialize in other things.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Best People Who
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.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Power Like Much
Just as producers often give consumers things they want but didn't think to ask for, consumers sometimes come up with surprising uses for new inventions. When a new product appears, it can uncover dissatisfactions and desires no one knew were there.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Think Just Up
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-control regulation, or by taxation and redistribution.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Money About Also
The Internet exposes a diversity of opinion, experience, and taste we'd been led to believe didn't exist. If you were unusual in 1950 or 1980 - and everyone is unusual in one way or another - you were an isolated anomaly. Now you're a Web ring, a Yahoo category.
Virginia Postrel
The Internet ethos of diversity and competition runs exactly counter to uniform, gatekeeper-oriented medical culture - the technocratic philosophy of the 'one best way' embodied in our pharmaceutical regulations. On the Net, medical information is abundant, and pharmacies, domestic and foreign, operate on many different models.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Best Medical Our
Our demand for good looks, expressed in the biting comments that ensue when public figures fall short of perfection, puts enormous pressures on these individuals and may screen out the otherwise qualified. If video killed the radio star, it may also be doing away with the homely politician.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Good Out Our
The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Work Future Just
Medicare is a monopoly: a central-planning bureaucracy grafted onto American health care. It exercises a stranglehold on the health care of all Americans over 65, and on the medical practices of almost all physicians. Medicare decides what is legitimate and what is not: which prices may be charged and which services may be rendered.
Virginia Postrel
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 personal qualities and political positions they want in a president.
Virginia Postrel
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 far above us that we can't identify with the person.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: World Us Little
In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life?
Virginia Postrel
A world of few choices, whether in jeans or mates, is a world in which individual differences become sources of alienation, unhappiness, even self-loathing. If no jeans fit, you'll feel uncomfortable or inferior. If no housing developments reflect your taste for unique architecture, you'll write screeds against philistine mass culture.
Virginia Postrel
Society needs both parents and nonparents, both the work party and the home party. While raising children is the most important work most people will do, not everyone is cut out for parenthood. And, as many a childless teacher has proved, raising kids is not the only important contribution a person can make to their future.
Virginia Postrel
Tags: Work Home Future