Free Republic

For more than two centuries, The Saturday Evening Post has chronicled American life in its pages, enshrining a homespun national identity and printing some of the nation’s greatest writers. That’s changing next year. The magazine’s January issue will be its last in print, according to Joan SerVaas, the president and publisher. In a letter to the Post’s 50,000 subscribers in the most recent issue, she attributed the decision to a combination of “rising production costs, declining advertising revenue and shifting reader habits.” “We’ve been dealing with it for over a decade,” SerVaas said in an interview. “We continued hoping it...

“Author Claims Norman Rockwell Was Closeted Homosexual,” William Bigelow writes at Big Government: American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, a new biography of the great American artist and iconic figure Norman Rockwell, accuses him of being a closeted homosexual, basing the spurious claim on the fact that Rockwell would stop young boys on the street or at recess and ask if they would pose for his illustrations. The author, Deborah Solomon, ignores the fact that Rockwell, who was married three times and had three children with his second wife, who died unexpectedly in 1959, stated in his...

If we want to reduce fossil fuel consumption, I say, we should raise the price of gasoline to $7 a gallon. Reason: Today this country burns through 21 million barrels of oil per day, 60 percent of which is imported. Only with some shared economic pain will we ever change our habits. High gas prices will force us to think before we drive. It will encourage mass transit use, car pooling, and the sale of more fuel-efficient cars. The auto industry will not suffer because it has learned that it can charge more for cars that are cheaper to build...