The surprising impact of popular movements on judicial doctrines
Jedediah Purdy
Jedediah S. Purdy is a senior correspondent of The American Prospect and a second-year student at Yale Law School. Purdy started with the Prospect as a writing fellow, writing about culture, technology, politics, and the environment. His 1998 articles include "Age of Irony" on a generation that refuses to take itself seriously, and "Dolly and Madison" on the ethics of cloning.
His first book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, was published by Knopf in September 1999. His current research addresses agriculture, environmental sustainability, and the place of work in American culture. He has also been working on conceptions of human excellence in democratic politics. In 1999 he was a faculty member at the Century Institute Summer Program on America's liberal and progressive political traditions.
Purdy was born and raised on a hillside farm in central West Virginia. Until age 14, he taught himself by reading, exploring the local woods and meadows, and working alongside his parents and younger sister. After a checkered high school career that eventually took him to Phillips Exeter Academy, he returned to West Virginia, where he worked as a carpenter and spent a year in environmental politics.
In 1997 he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in social studies. In 1996 he was selected as a Truman Scholar and as West Virginia's nominee for the Rhodes Scholarship.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
The New Open Society
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass Sunstein (Oxford University Press, 288 pages, $25.00) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler (Yale University Press, 520 pages, $40.00) Internet utopianism can seem so 1998. The future was silicon in the late Clinton years, […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Freedom’s New Fight
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity By Lawrence Lessig, The Penguin Press, 345 pages, $24.95 In the mid-1990s, Alex Alben pioneered a new Hollywood genre: a DVD retrospective on an actor’s career, structured around contemporary interviews with the actor but including clips […]
Posted inEnergy and the Environment
Essay: The God of the Digerati
Wired magazine says with new technology we’ll all be like gods and should get good at it. That apparently means feeling no restraint — if something looks good, do it, buy it, invent it, become it. Where have we heard this before?
Posted inEnergy and the Environment
State of the Debate: Dolly and Madison
The cloning debate has highlighted moral questions that are likely only to become even more difficult as biotechnology advances: What should be the line between permissible and impermissible genetic interventions? Is our bedrock belief in human equality about to break down?
Posted inFeatures
State of the Debate: The Libertarian Conceit
Political excess in the twentieth century gives libertarianism understandable appeal. But caveat emptor; the path from Isaiah Berlin does not lead to Charles Murray.
Posted inAmerica and the World
From Purity to Politics
Under repressive totalitarian regimes, the absolute moral rectitude of Eastern European intellectuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik was heroic. Ten years after the fall of the Wall, what happens when the reality of democratic politics calls for quotidian pragmatism and petty compromise?
Posted inBooks
State of the Debate: The Chicago Acid Bath
A skeptical inquiry into the work of Richard Epstein and Richard Posner.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
If Wishing Only Made it So
Two recent movies, Patch Adams and Life Is Beautiful, each claim to reveal the relation between fantasy and politics. One succeeds magnificently; the other is a fraud.
Posted inEnergy and the Environment
Rape of the Appalachians
Strip mining is carving up broad swaths of West Virginia’s hillsides and valleys. Are we willing to pay higher energy prices to stop it?