Virginia Postrel

A brilliant analyst and award-winning commentator, Virginia Postrel speaks and writes about culture and social trends and their economic implications.

Her recent work focuses on aesthetics and how fundamental they are to our personal, social and economic lives. Her book, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness, explores how the look and feel of things has become the new—and required—ingredient in creating economic value and how to turn the trend toward aesthetics to competitive advantage.

In her current research, she is focusing on:

• Glamour—understood not as a particular style but as an imaginative process that takes many different forms, depending on the context
• Variety and Choice—the management choices that have made the variety revolution possible, the psychological challenges it poses for consumers, and the opportunities it presents for both future business models and personal pleasure and meaning.

Virginia is a contributing editor for The Atlantic, writing a monthly column on “Commerce and Culture.” She also contributes columns to Forbes four times a year. She was an economics columnist for The New York Times business section for six years.

Writing in Vanity Fair, Sam Tanenhaus described Virginia as “a master D.J. who sequences the latest riffs from the hard sciences, the social sciences, business, and technology, to name only a few sources.” Camille Paglia has called her “one of the smartest women in America.”

Virginia was the editor of Reason magazine from July 1989 to January 2000 and editor-at-large in 2000 and 2001. During her eleven years of leadership, the publication won was selected as a finalist for the National Magazine Awards, the industry’s highest honor, for essays in 1993 and public interest journalism in 1996 and 1998. She also founded Reason Online.