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
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There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.
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Like the skyscraper, the automobile, and the motion-picture palace, neon signs once symbolized popular hopes for a new era of technological achievement and commercial abundance. From the 1920s to the 1950s, neon-lit streets pulsed with visual excitement from Vancouver to Miami.
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'Frankenstein' did not invent the fear of science; the novel found its audience because it dramatized anxieties that already existed. Although popular entertainment can, over the long run, shape public perceptions, it becomes popular in the first place only if it addresses preexisting hopes, fears, and fascinations.
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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.
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Science is about exploring the unknown and cannot offer guarantees.
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The United States government approaches patient choice in medication as Singapore does free speech: its pronouncements sound reasonable and tolerant until you threaten its prerogatives.
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The mere existence of 'Buffy' proves the declinists wrong about one thing: Hollywood commercialism can produce great art. Complex and evolving characters. Playful language. Joy and sorrow, pathos and elation. Episodes that dare to be different - to tell stories in silence or in song. Big themes and terrible choices.
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Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much opportunity for grand gestures. It has little room for martyrs. But life is not supposed to be about dying well. It is about living well.
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Glamour is not something you possess but something you perceive, not something you have but something you feel. It is a subjective response to a stimulus.
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The profusion of fonts is one more product of the digital revolution. Beginning in the mid-'80s and accelerating in the 1990s, type design weathered the sort of radical, technology-driven transformation that other creative industries, including music, publishing, and movies, now face.