Russell Arben Fox

There is an accusation which has been flung over the decades (if not centuries) at practically every sort of intentional community-building effort, thus oddly discovering something which apparently entirely disparate elements of the right and left have in common.

[T}he legacy of Occupy Wall Street was “something that touches our deepest spiritual yearning,” in a very un-Walzerian sense; “its practice says: ‘We will no longer live in hatred and competition. We will live in love and community.'”

The fundamental focus in this book is traffic, meaning the movement of people and goods along streets and roads, which is literally the lifeblood, the circulatory system, of any urbanized space.

If future historians wish to find some silver lining in COVID-19, the rise in mutualism in response to the shut-downs and dislocations it made necessary may be a good candidate.

Philosophers from Aristotle to Polanyi have consistently argued that nothing can so engage people as real tactile experience, and real practical work.

Grace Olmstead’s book may not be the final masterpiece of all possible localist argument, but it is a set of very smart reflections on localism and rural life…