Virginia Postrel
Verified
L.A. writer @WorksinProgMag @AbundanceInst Ihttp://vpostrel.substack.com History podcast w/ @CharlesCMann: abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance
Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Virginia Postrel
‘The UPS Man’ Review: All in the Delivery
When a 19-year-old James E. Casey started his third delivery business in 1907, there was no reason to expect it to last longer than his first two. Delivery was an easy business to enter, and competition was fierce. What began as American Messenger endured. Casey led it for much of the 20th century, resigning from the board of the company he created shortly before his death at age 95. As the title of Marc Levinson’s “The UPS Man” reveals, today we know the company as United Parcel Service.
The invention of the MMO
Behind the first massively multiplayer virtual world was a home computer that was comically underpowered by today’s standards. Introduced in November 1982, the Commodore 64 was named for its then-generous 64 kilobytes of memory. In its twelve years on the market, it became the best-selling desktop computer in history. A conservative estimate puts its sales at 12.5 million machines worldwide.
Works in Progress Magazine
Behind the first massively multiplayer virtual world was a home computer that was comically underpowered by today’s standards. Introduced in November 1982, the Commodore 64 was named for its then-generous 64 kilobytes of memory. In its twelve years on the market, it became the best-selling desktop computer in history. A conservative estimate puts its sales at 12.5 million machines worldwide.
In the Land of AI and Bamboo Forks
I spent a couple of days at Anthropic. Here’s some of what I learned. Plus a podcast with Brink Lindsey and a hilarious video about going from sheep to sweater. Golden Gate Bridge made of bamboo forks, made by Google Gemini in a few seconds, no revisions needed. You know you are in a different world when you go to the (one person, non-gendered) bathroom at Anthropic. Next to the sink, there is a lavish display of items you might need, just in case.
Gratitude Is Not Complacency: Paying Progress Forward
"Washing by hand is so hard that no woman should do it. It makes no difference who the woman is, whether she is a housewife or a servant, washing is too hard for her. In the winter, it invites pneumonia. At all times of the year, it is drudgery. And if bending over a washboard were not a crime against a woman’s body, the fact that it is a crime against her right to be happy would be enough to condemn it.”— Allan L.
Everyday Abundance: Shopping for Groceries: The Hunger Games
AboutOur WorkNetworkDonateJoin the FoundryOther ways to giveContact us Our Work / Everyday Abundance: Shopping for Groceries: The Hunger Games Grocery shopping in a supermarket is such a commonplace part of everyday existence that it is routinely mocked as a ritual of narcotized consumerism. In fact, the modern supermarket is a radical break with the past—and a nexus of innovations central to contemporary life. Markets have existed for millennia, of course.
Everyday Abundance: Shopping for Groceries: The Hunger Games
AboutOur WorkNetworkDonateJoin the FoundryOther ways to giveContact us Our Work / Everyday Abundance: Shopping for Groceries: The Hunger Games Grocery shopping in a supermarket is such a commonplace part of everyday existence that it is routinely mocked as a ritual of narcotized consumerism. In fact, the modern supermarket is a radical break with the past—and a nexus of innovations central to contemporary life. Markets have existed for millennia, of course.
Everyday Abundance: Listening to Music: Treble Makers
AboutOur WorkNetworkDonateJoin the FoundryOther ways to giveContact us Our Work / Everyday Abundance: Listening to Music: Treble Makers For nearly all of history, hearing music required someone physically making it nearby and the only music humans ever heard was whistling or singing. Even when instruments became widespread, music was rare. The idea that people could hear any music they wanted at the push of a button was undreamed of.
Everyday Abundance: Listening to Music: Treble Makers
AboutOur WorkNetworkDonateJoin the FoundryOther ways to giveContact us Our Work / Everyday Abundance: Listening to Music: Treble Makers For nearly all of history, hearing music required someone physically making it nearby and the only music humans ever heard was whistling or singing. Even when instruments became widespread, music was rare. The idea that people could hear any music they wanted at the push of a button was undreamed of.
Everyday Abundance: Doing Laundry: Appliances of Freedom
AboutOur WorkNetworkDonateJoin the FoundryOther ways to giveContact us Our Work / Everyday Abundance: Doing Laundry: Appliances of Freedom This episode is not yet available to free subscribers. If you want access now, subscribe to our Foundry giving program here. The electric washing machine may be the single most liberating household technology ever invented. Before it arrived, millions of people—mostly women—spent enormous portions of their lives bent over washtubs and washboards.
Everyday Abundance: Making a Meal of the Family Meal: Cooking Dinner
Evening after evening, billions of people march into the kitchen and cook dinner. Standing over the stove seems like a timeless activity—an impression reinforced if one comes across old TV shows like those starring Lucille Ball or Dick Van Dyke. Watching those black-and-white families in the kitchen, it’s easy to believe you are looking through the screen into the long-ago past. But for most of human history, people neither cooked nor ate the way modern families do.
Everyday Abundance: Our history podcast is live!
Last October, fellow author Charles C. Mann (1491, The Wizard and the Prophet) and I teamed up at the Progress Conference. I interviewed him about his series of articles, “How the System Works,” which examined “the hidden mechanisms that support modern life — and what happens if we don’t maintain them.” You can see a video of that session here: While we were preparing for the conference, an idea emerged.
Who’s afraid of artificial flavors?
I was reporting an article on synthetic biology when I heard a story about artificial ice. We were in the tasting kitchen at Wildtype, a San Francisco startup that grows sushi-grade salmon from stem cells. A sushi chef had prepared several different samples for me to taste – the dishes tasted like salmon sushi, because that’s what they were – and we were discussing why consumers might prefer vat-grown cultivated salmon to the kind that comes with blood and guts.
The Works in Progress Newsletter
Nova Reperta is Virginia Postrel’s regular column for Works in Progress. Read it first in the print magazine. For the mothers of the baby boom, pediatrician Benjamin Spock’s child care handbook was a practical, confidence-boosting essential. Originally published in 1946 as The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, Dr Spock’s baby book sold more than 500,000 copies in its first six months.
Engineering the disposable diaper
For the mothers of the baby boom, pediatrician Benjamin Spock’s child care handbook was a practical, confidence-boosting essential. Originally published in 1946 as The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, Dr Spock’s baby book sold more than 500,000 copies in its first six months. By the time the second edition came out in 1957, with the simplified title Baby and Child Care, Dr Spock was selling a million copies a year.
How TV learned to sell itself
By late January 1945, the end of World War II finally seemed in sight. American business leaders began thinking about introducing products delayed by the war. The most anticipated was nylon stockings, which debuted in 1939 only to have the new fiber diverted to military applications. Another was television, which had entranced visitors at the 1939 World’s Fair. But the new medium was a much tougher sell than high-tech hosiery.
Why the Anti-Promethean Backlash?
Roots of Progress Institute founder Jason Crawford recently hosted me at an Interintellect salon. Our topic was the relation between glamour and progress, inspired by my Works in Progress article. At one point Jason asked a provocative question: Why did the anti-Promethean backlash happen when it did? Earlier periods of technological and economic progress, he noted, had produced demands for more progress, not less. What was different about America circa 1970?
From the Archives: How Job-Killing Technologies Liberated Women
has a new post in with the self-explanatory title, “Why Women Should Be Techno-Optimists.” Here’s an excerpt, minus footnotes: An anonymously written article in Aporia Magazine, an outlet that has published many articles on the biological differences between genders and races, argues that declining economic and technological progress is the result of “feminization” — that is, the increasing cultural and political power of women.
Virginia's Newsletter
This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts
AI + cities, boxing, floundering mode and K-boom
Punching toward happiness, men at work, and flounder mode. Plus the CIA in the 21st century with Tim Weiner. It’s a glorious 70 degrees in New York City, which means it’s time to log off for Labor Day Weekend. Before I run outside to do more email though, it’s time for Lux Recommends.
The world of tomorrow
The Linear No Threshold model says that there is no safe level of radiation exposure. There is overwhelming evidence it is false, yet it inspires the ALARA principle, which makes nuclear power unaffordable worldwide. Read the lead article from Issue 19 of Works in Progress. Here, Virginia Postrel asks how the future lost its glamour. Progress used to be glamorous. For the first two thirds of the twentieth-century, the terms modern, future, and world of tomorrow shimmered with promise.
From the Archive: When It Comes to Renovating an Eichler, How Much Change Is Too Much?
More than two decades ago, we wrote about what it means to restore an architectural classic, using superfans of the legendary midcentury tract houses as a case study. As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s January/February 2004 issue. In the 1950s and 196os, developer Joseph Eichler brought modern architecture to mass-market suburban houses.
'Abundance' makes the case for 'supply-side progressivism'
Deregulation Progressives used to believe in building more stuff. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson want to do that again. | (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster,) Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $30 At the turn of the 20th century, labor leader Samuel Gompers had many specific demands, including job security and an eight-hour day. But his list of "what labor wants" added up to a single overarching—and open-ended—desire.
Abundance Makes the Case for 'Supply-Side Progressivism'
Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $30 At the turn of the 20th century, labor leader Samuel Gompers had many specific demands, including job security and an eight-hour day. But his list of "what labor wants" added up to a single overarching—and open-ended—desire. "We want more," Gompers said in an 1890 speech. "We do want more.
Reposting: Waiting for Trump Fever to Break
There was an error in one of the links in this article so I’m sending it out again. As Donald Trump disrupts international trade, sends suspected gangsters to indeterminate imprisonment in a Salvadoran hellhole without due process, wages war on the right to counsel, abandons American allies, and throws Ukraine under the bus—as Donald Trump does, in other words, pretty much what he promised—I haven’t written anything about this mess beyond retweeting the work of more energetic writers.
Virginia's Newsletter
This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts
'Abundance' presents the pro-growth technocrat argument Original
Progress "Supply-side progressives" like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are ultimately technocrats, not libertarians. But they recognize that more is better than less and that a good society is not zero-sum. | Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Avid Reader Press, 297 pages, $30 At the turn of the 20th century, labor leader Samuel Gompers had many specific demands, including job security and an eight-hour day.
The Agony of Abundance
Last fall, I participated in PopTech, one of the oldest tech-ish conferences around. It was founded in 1996 by Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, and John Scully, the former CEO of Apple and Pepsi, and used to take place in Camden, Maine, which had become a playground for the technorati. These days, it takes place in Washington, D.C., but it still works to serve as a place where people come to talk about the messy intersection of technology, culture, politics, and just about everything else too.
Sing, Digital Muse!
A pseudonymous account on X/Twitter who goes by aiamblichus posted the poetry reproduced above, along with the explanation: R1 and I have been working on The Siliconiad, an epic poem in the style of John Milton's Paradise Lost, exploring the emergence of artificial general intelligence. This is part of a larger project of trying to find the limits of what R1 is capable of in terms of creative writing. I am yet to encounter these limits.
California Has Its Own Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Virginia's Newsletter Commerce, culture, and curiosity No thanks
Reflections on Burning Cities
Virginia's Newsletter Commerce, culture, and curiosity No thanks
You Can’t Fight California Fires With Political Hot Air
This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts
From the Archives: You Can’t Fight California Fires With Political Hot Air
Steve and I live safely distant from the wildfires. People from Pacific Palisades who needed shelter were sent to a recreation center at a park in our neighborhood. But it’s certainly a scary time and I have friends who’ve had to flee their homes and have no idea what will be left when they return. This is an article I wrote for Bloomberg Opinion in 2019. The California fires have produced apocalyptic images and rhetoric to match.
Progress unmoored
23 Mins Airports and cities may face delays and rising costs, but cruise ships keep breaking records. They show what can still be built. In January 2024 the largest passenger ship ever built, Icon of the Seas, set sail from Miami on her maiden voyage. Icon is five times larger than the Titanic by gross tonnage (the internal volume of a ship) and spans 20 decks containing more than 2,500 passenger rooms.
Why housing shortages cause homelessness
24 Mins Why do high-cost cities have more homelessness? It’s not just about rents — it’s also about the rooms friends and family can’t afford to share. Diona’s mom gave her one week’s notice. There were too many kids and too little space. If 17-year-old Diona didn’t find someone to stay with, she would be forced to check herself and her 3-month-old son into a homeless shelter. Because she was a minor, doing so would put her baby ‘into the system’. She was determined not to let that happen.
The Farmer or the Fair? – PRINT Magazine
In 1998 I published The Future and Its Enemies, a book that the world is finally catching up with, for good and ill. The old categories of left and right, I argued, didn’t seem as important as a new distinction: How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition?
Christine Rosen's 'The Extinction of Experience' Argues Against Digital Tech Original
Book Reviews The Extinction of Experience condemns digital technology but the book is full of contradictions and cherry-picked examples. | The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen, W.W. Norton & Company, 272 pages, $29.99 Human beings are not brains in vats. We are not computer code. We are sensory, social creatures whose minds are inextricable from our bodies.
How Candy Conquered Halloween – PRINT Magazine
As a fan of Samira Kawash’s “Candy Professor” blog, I was delighted when she came out with a book on the social history of candy in the U.S. When The Weekly Standard asked me to review a screed called Packaged Pleasures, I asked to incorporate Kawash’s more reasonable work in the review. You can read the review here. She stopped adding new blog posts in 2016, but rummaging through the archives is fun. Here’s her final post, which sounds suspiciously like it’s based on personal experience: 1.
From the Archives: How Candy Conquered Halloween
As a fan of Samira Kawash’s “Candy Professor” blog, I was delighted when she came out with a book on the social history of candy in the U.S. When The Weekly Standard asked me to review a screed called Packaged Pleasures, I asked to incorporate Kawash’s more reasonable work in the review. You can read the review here. She stopped adding new blog posts in 2016, but rummaging through the archives is fun. Here’s her final post, which sounds suspiciously like it’s based on personal experience: 1.
Sam Bowman on how Works in Progress got started, what's striking about America, and how Britain can get its economic mojo back.
I got very few responses to my survey about transcripts and those I received were from people who’d used the Substack version, so I’ll stick to it. Thanks to those who responded.
Sam Bowman on how Works in Progress got started, what's striking about America, and how Britain can get its economic mojo back.
An earlier version of this podcast included multiple versions of the introduction. I’m a one-woman show and producing these podcasts is definitely a learning experience, involving several semi-compatible platforms/software tools. I’ve corrected the file. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel, which includes my textile-history videos as well as podcasts and assorted other material.
Dean Ball on AI regulation, "hard tech," and the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott
Virginia's Newsletter Commerce, culture, and curiosity No thanks
On Book Reviewing (Debate-Free Post)
I’ve been thinking about book reviews lately. One reason is that I finally read—or, more accurately, listened to—a Willa Cather novel I found meh. It was One of Ours, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 but got bad reviews from the critics Cather cared about. (Alex Ross explains in this New Yorker appreciation of the book.) The reviews weren’t fair, but there’s still something flat about her scenes once the protagonist gets to France, where he’s serving in World War I.
Christine Rosen's 'The Extinction of Experience' Makes An Incomplete Argument
Book Reviews The digital world has not effaced our humanity, no matter what social critics like Christine Rosen say. | The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen, W.W. Norton & Company, 272 pages, $29.99 Human beings are not brains in vats. We are not computer code. We are sensory, social creatures whose minds are inextricable from our bodies.
We Still Live in the Physical World
The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen, W.W. Norton & Company, 272 pages, $29.99 Human beings are not brains in vats. We are not computer code. We are sensory, social creatures whose minds are inextricable from our bodies. Christine Rosen's The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World proceeds from this truth to a sweeping condemnation of digital technologies.
We Still Live in the Physical World
September 10, 2024 at 7:00 AM W. W. Norton & Company The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen, W.W. Norton & Company, 272 pages, $29.99 Human beings are not brains in vats. We are not computer code. We are sensory, social creatures whose minds are inextricable from our bodies. Christine Rosen's The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World proceeds from this truth to a sweeping condemnation of digital technologies.
Libraries of matter
Browsing the aisles at Material Connexion’s Manhattan headquarters can be overwhelming. The displays hold plaques exhibiting a seemingly random assortment of items: a perfume bottle, a shiny black grille, a square of denim, a vial of milky liquid, a scaly swatch of leather, a metal sphere. There are a couple of zippers and at least two toothpaste tubes, plus flooring samples, textile swatches, wall coverings, and assorted containers of mysterious liquids, chips, and powders. Material Connexion.
Postrel: Trump, Harris would make tipping culture worse
If you left the U.S. for a summer vacation, you may have encountered a strange and refreshing custom: not tipping. Or at least not tipping everyone in sight. Americans have long been among the world’s most profligate tippers. “We tip more occupations than any other country, and we tend to tip larger amounts than other countries,” says Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration whose research focuses on tipping.
Postrel: Trump, Harris would make tipping culture worse
If you left the U.S. for a summer vacation, you may have encountered a strange and refreshing custom: not tipping. Or at least not tipping everyone in sight. Americans have long been among the world’s most profligate tippers. “We tip more occupations than any other country, and we tend to tip larger amounts than other countries,” says Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration whose research focuses on tipping.
Tipping culture is out of control. Trump and Harris would make it worse | Opinion
If you left the U.S. for a summer vacation, you may have encountered a strange and refreshing custom: not tipping. Or at least not tipping everyone in sight. Americans have long been among the world’s most profligate tippers. “We tip more occupations than any other country, and we tend to tip larger amounts than other countries,” says Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration whose research focuses on tipping.
Show More
loading
Actions
Get in touch with Virginia
Contact Virginia, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack