Virginia Postrel

Virginia Postrel
Born Virginia Inman
(1960-01-14) January 14, 1960
Greenville, South Carolina [1]
Residence Los Angeles, California
Nationality American
Alma mater Princeton University (B.A., English Literature, 1982) [1]
Occupation Author
Known for Libertarianism
Spouse(s) Steven Postrel

Virginia Inman Postrel (born January 14, 1960) is an American political and cultural writer of broadly libertarian, or classical liberal, views.[2]

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.[3] 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.”[4]

Early life and education

Virginia Inman was born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina. Her father was an engineer and her mother was a homemaker who later went on to get her master's degree and teach at the college level. Virginia went on to college at Princeton University, graduating in 1982 with a degree in English Literature.[1]

Career

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.[5] She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).[6] 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.[7] 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.[8][9] 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 the pieces, she discusses strategies for working around these restrictions, such as organ donor transplant chains.[10][11]

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.[12][13] 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 the 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.[14] 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.

See also

Bibliography

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Interview with Virginia Postrel : The Future and Its Enemies", Booknotes, PBS, February 14, 1999
  2. ↑ Postrel, Virginia (2007-03-18). "An 18th-Century Brain in a 21st-Century Head". Cato Unbound. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
  3. ↑ "The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel". Dynamist.com. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
  4. ↑ Silber, Kenneth (2013-11-01). "Review: The Power of Glamour." Quicksilber. Retrieved 2013-11-07.
  5. ↑ "Virginia Postrel's bio". Dynamist.com. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
  6. ↑ "Board of Directors - The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education". FIRE. 2003-12-19. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
  7. ↑ "Virginia Postrel - Authors". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
  8. ↑ Shlaes, Amity (2006-03-15). "I Would Give My Left Kidney to Prove I'm Right: Amity Shlaes". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
  9. ↑ Satel, Sally. "Desperately Seeking a Kidney". Nytimes.com. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
  10. ↑ "Virginia Postrel on donating a kidney". Dynamist.com. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
  11. ↑ Postrel, Virginia (2009-07-09). "With Functioning Kidneys for All - Virginia Postrel". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
  12. ↑ "My Drug Problem". Theatlantic.com. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
  13. ↑ Postrel, Virginia (2009-03-30). "Defending "My Drug Problem" - Virginia Postrel". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
  14. ↑ Postrel, Virginia (2008-04-01). "The Art of Healing - Virginia Postrel". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2013-10-01.
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