Virginia Postrel

Virginia Postrel is an author, columnist, and speaker whose work spans a broad range of topics, from social science to fashion, concentrating on the intersection of culture, commerce, and technology.

A brilliant analyst and award-winning commentator, Postrel speaks and writes about a wide range of topics, often centered on culture, social trends, and economics. She offers audiences valuable business-oriented insights into fashion, design, and architecture, innovation and intellectual property, politics and social policy.

Postrel is not only a Bloomberg View columnist but also an accomplished author. The author of The FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, Postrel also 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 have become the new—and required—ingredient in creating economic value and how to turn the trend toward aesthetics to competitive advantage.

In her research, she focuses on glamour, understood not as a particular style but as an imaginative process that takes many different forms, depending on the context. She is currently writing a book on glamour and is editor-in-chief of DeepGlamour.net. Her book The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion focuses on this subject.

She also writes on the vast expansion of choices available to consumers in virtually all areas, the psychological challenges it poses for consumers, and the opportunities it presents for both future business models and personal pleasure and meaning.

Postrel was contributing editor for The Atlantic for three years, writing a monthly column on "Commerce and Culture," and a columnist for Forbes magazine. For six years, she was an economics columnist for The New York Times. Her personal blog appears on her website, Dynamist.com.

Her first book, The Future and Its Enemies, argued compellingly for an open society free from constraints as the key to progress and innovation.

Postrel served as the editor of Reason magazine, for eleven years during which time it was selected three times as a finalist for National Magazine Awards, the industry's highest honor, and she founded Reason Online.

She has twice been a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. Her work has been featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 and in the forthcoming edition for 2009.