Calendar of Events

The Program for the Study of Liberty at the UCLA School of Public Affairs welcomes Virginia Postrel, as she speaks about her experience as a kidney donor and ending the waiting list for kidney transplants.Virginia Postrel is the author of The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies. She is currently writing a book on glamour for The Free Press and is editor-in-chief of DeepGlamour.net. She is a contributing editor for The Atlantic, where she formerly wrote the “Culture & Commerce” column. Her personal weblog appears here. For six years, she was an economics columnist for The New York Times business section, with her last column appearing March 23, 2006. She publishes articles on cultural and economic topics in a wide range of publications.In March 2006, she donated a kidney to her friend Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She has become a vocal advocate of living organ donations and of reforming federal laws that prohibit payment of any “valuable consideration” to organ donors. She writes and speaks frequently on the subject. Postrel is a popular speaker at business, design, and academic groups. She is represented by the Leigh Bureau and has spoken at a wide range of venues, including TED 2004, the World Luxury Congress, the Naval War College, the American Institute for Graphic Arts, the Mont Pelerin Society, Pop!Tech, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Urban Land Institute, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian Institute’s Millennium on the Mall celebration. Her corporate speaking venues have included Nike, Procter & Gamble, Target, Liz Claiborne, Sony, and IDEO.From July 1989 to January 2000, Postrel was the editor of Reason magazine. Under her leadership, Reason 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 founded Reason Online, the magazine’s website, in 1995. During 2000 and 2001, she served as Reason’s editor-at-large.Postrel has been a columnist for Forbes, for its companion technology magazine Forbes ASAP, and for D Magazine, the Dallas city magazine.She serves on the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. She has been a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.Her work has been featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 and the forthcoming The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009. Postrel has twice been a finalist in the commentary category of the Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism for her columns in Reason. In 1995, she received the Free Press Association’s Mencken Award for Commentary for an editorial in Reason. In 2002, she received the Press Club of Dallas’s Katie Award for commentary for a column in D Magazine.Prior to becoming editor of the magazine in 1989, Postrel served as associate editor of Reason and, before that, as a reporter for Inc. and The Wall Street Journal.Postrel graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University, with a degree in English literature. She is married to Steven Postrel, an economist and business strategy professor, and lives in Los Angeles.