Virginia Postrel
Virginia Postrel
Virginia Inman Postrelis an American political and cultural writer of broadly libertarian, or classical liberal, views...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth14 January 1960
CountryUnited States of America
case people pool public push rare unusual
By giving unusual people an easy way to find one another, the Internet has also enabled them to pool rare talents, resources, and voices, then push their case into public consciousness. The response, in many cases, is a kind of hysteria.
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Like Disneyland, luxury retailers have long had to figure out how to overcome customers' natural inertia. Unlike less pricey stores, they tend not to attract idle browsers who make impulse purchases.
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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.
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For designers, the rigidity of an alphabet presents a never-ending artistic challenge: How do you do something new and still preserve the letters' essential forms?
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Americans hate their cable companies - for bumbling installers, on-again-off-again transmissions, peculiar channel selections, and indifferent customer service. The only thing cable subscribers hate more than the cable company is not being able to get what it delivers: multichannel selection and good reception.
contact discomfort elevates evolving hype local native realities slate social trade wipe
Y2K hype taps our native discomfort with the realities of a dynamic, evolving social order. It elevates personal, local contact over the impersonality of the 'extended order' of trade and technological networks. It suggests that we can wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.
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In the fall of 1978, I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carolina for the secular, liberal, multi-ethnic, intense culture of Princeton University. Like most immigrants, I was looking for a better life in a place I only half understood.
attractive heroes images judge media pictures repulsive strangers
In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies.
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'CSI' has not only remained a top-rated show through seven seasons; it has had real-world consequences. Police and prosecutors complain of a 'CSI' effect' that leads juries to demand more physical evidence than they used to expect. College officials use the same term to describe spiking enrollment in forensic-science programs.
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Surprise drives progress because innovation depends on the sort of knowledge no one can gather in a central place.
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Even before Sputnik, scientists and policy makers worried that not enough Americans were studying science.
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Like the 'test tube babies' born of in vitro fertilization, cloned children need not be identifiable, much less freaks or outcasts.
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Habituation is indeed a fact of human psychology. That's one reason we like novelty, including different cuts of jeans.
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Before it became a ubiquitous part of urban life, Starbucks was, in most American cities, a radically new idea.