Virginia Postrel
Virginia Postrel | |
|---|---|
 Postrel (2019) | |
| Born | Virginia Inman 1960 (age 65–66) |
| Education | Princeton University (BA) |
| Occupations | Journalist, author, columnist |
| Known for |
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| Spouse | Steven Postrel |
| Website | https://vpostrel.com/ |
Virginia Inman Postrel (/ˈpɑːˈstrɛl/ PAH-STREL; born 1960) is an American journalist and author who writes on commerce, culture, and technology. She is a contributing editor at Works in Progress and co-host of the podcast Everyday Abundance.
From 1989 to 2000, Postrel was editor-in-chief of Reason, the American libertarian monthly. She took the magazine online and doubled its print circulation. She later wrote columns for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg View. Postrel shared the Bastiat Prize in 2011 for her columns. She describes herself as writing from a "classical liberal" perspective.
Postrel was among the first American political commentators to start a blog, and she is the author of four books. Her first, The Future and Its Enemies (1998), posited a conflict between "dynamists" and "stasists" that cuts across the left–right divide. It found an early following in Silicon Valley and has been described as an antecedent of the abundance movement in 2020s American policy debate. The Substance of Style (2003) argued that aesthetic value had become part of mass commerce, and The Power of Glamour (2013) treated glamour as a form of "nonverbal rhetoric". The Fabric of Civilization (2020) is a global history of textiles and their role in technology and trade.