Obama's glamour problem: former reason editor Virginia Postrel on the economics of health care and the intersection of glamour and politics.

• Author: Balaker, Ted
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Interview

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VIRGINIA POSTREL has a knack for changing the way people think about everyday phenomena. As editor of mason during the 1990s, Postrel predicted how Western enthusiasm for Marxism would, in the wake of communism's collapse, transfer seamlessly to a top-down, regulatory brand of environmentalism. When the World Wide Web triggered the excitable imaginations of censorious legislators, she calmly explained that thick strains in both major political tendencies cling to the precautionary principle at the expense of liberating progress.

In The Future and its Enemies (1998), Postrel tossed aside the traditional left-right paradigm and posited a new post-Cold War divide between "dynamists" and "stasists," in which the former championed choice and creativity and the latter clung to fear and control. In The Substance of Style (2003), she unpacked the economics of design and offered an appreciation of the Age of Aesthetics.And when she donated her own kidney to a woman on the organ waiting list in 2006, Postrel introduced tens of thousands of people to the once radical idea of organ markets in a way no academic treatise ever could. In each of these cases, those who encounter Postrel's work will never look at the subject the same way again.

In 2009 Postrel launched a new website called Deep Glamour to probe (as its motto says) the "intersection of imagination & desire." In a typically eclectic selection from March, the site discussed female body image, the universal hatred for Oscar speeches, the power of nonverbal rhetoric, and whether cuteness and glamour can co-exist. By changing the way we think about glamour, Postrel is helping us better understand, among other things, the allure and frustration of the current American president.

Now 50, Postrel has spent her post-mason career writing for The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and her popular personal blog (vpostrel.com/weblog). reason.tv producer Ted Balaker caught up with Postrel last February in Los Angeles, where she returned in 2007 after living for several years in Dallas. You can watch an edited video of this interview at reason.tv.

reason: Tell us about DeepGlamour. net.

Virginia Postrel: DeepGlamour.net explores glamour in its many manifestations. We write essays; it's not a street fashion blog or something like that. My view of glamour is that it is not a style, it is not just about movie stars, and it is in fact a powerful form of visual rhetoric and persuasion, an imaginative process like humor that takes place between an audience and an object. It takes many different forms, depending on the audience and what they find glamorous--the cultural context.

reason: You've called glamour a beautiful illusion. A lot of people would say that describes President Obama.

Postrel: Yes, President Obama is a very glamorous figure. Glamour is a particular form of illusion. It's an illusion that tells a truth about the audience's desires, and it requires mystery and distance. During the campaign people projected onto Barack Obama whatever they wanted in a president or even in a country...