Recently retired, Brian worked for three decades in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside. He specialized in twentieth-century U.S. intellectual and cultural history. He writes now as an advocate for localization, which he sees as the most promising strategy for defusing the many crises we face and reconnecting to the things that make life pleasurable. His essays and a “localist manifesto” are available at occupythehearth.org.
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Finding Life in the Flux
Since stories serve in every culture as the workshops of meaning, the urge to craft new ones may signal our readiness at long last to face up to what’s coming. All stories have characters. The qualities we attach to the ones in leading roles and the fates that befall them as plots unfold tell us a great deal about what we fear and what we value.
March 27, 2026
Modern Provincialism
It is the modernists, not the villagers, who are the “narrow provincials.” It is the believers in Progress who have chained daring and dynamism to petty purposes and passive self-absorption. That belief has bloodied the past and will do the same in any future built to its specifications.
October 28, 2025
Appalachia, Country Music, and American Politics
We have much cause to worry but neither comfort nor clarity will come if we fixate on widening polarization, Constitutional crises, or warring cultures. Those maladies are symptoms of a more profound distress.
April 9, 2025
Crazy Ideas, Wise Strategies, Small Politics
At the very moment when our survival demands a deep overturning of what we have long believed to be true and proper, settling for less will look like the crazier option.
July 1, 2024
Humane Values, Human Scale
Humane values, if they are to find a field of exercise, must be broadcast over a terrain populated by institutions that operate at human scale.
May 9, 2024
Leo Infrastructure
Only as visionaries will we get a realistic chance of narrowing the gap between the world we got and a world we would be happy to live in.
April 3, 2024
