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James Howard Kunstler
- Scourge of suburbia and techno-fantasists, Kunstler is the author of 20+ books, including The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and the prophetic World Made by Hand novels.
- Ex-Rolling Stone editor turned cultural heretic, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The American Conservative — back when those pages could handle dissent.
- Un-cancellable public thinker, he’s lectured at the Ivy League and skewered American delusions on stages from Harvard to Fox News — all while blogging twice weekly from the sane edges of Crazyland.
In his 2024 book, Crazyland, James Howard Kunstler wrote: “Historians of the future, flash-frying muskrat snouts with milkweed pods and chanterelles over their campfires, will speak of America’s travails in the early 21st century with a kind of nauseous, hushed awe, for this was the moment in history when our country became Crazyland.”
Mr. Kunstler’s public talks about the troubled politics of our time follow the comic approach of his popular twice-weekly blog on Substack, based on the motto that nothing is funnier than unhappiness.
A veteran of the decades-long culture wars, he enjoyed cancellation in 2016 with many fellow alt-journalists who did not fall for the hoaxes and hustles of the Left that followed Donald Trump’s election victory. This placed him comfortably on the margins where it was safe to watch the USA go insane.
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Speech Topics
Creating Places Worth Caring About
James Howard Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, “Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work.” It’s punishing human neurology, thwarts the development of children, and has entered its arc of disintegration.
For thirty years, the New Urbanist movement has delivered the remedy for the suburban fiasco: a return to the traditional American mixed-use town and neighborhood. Mr. Kunstler will describe in easy-to-follow, graphic terms how we can once again create places worthy of our affection. His performance has been referred to as “a delightful form of stand-up comedy.
How America Became Crazyland in the 21st Century, and What Are we Going to Do About It?
In the foreword to his book Crazyland, James Howard Kunstler wrote:
“What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality. A lot of things were going wrong in our country’s daily life. The fabulous production economy that had made America the envy of the world was gone, drop-kicked into the Third World. In its place arose a set Ponzi schemes and swindles (“financialization”) that stealthily embezzled away the wherewithal of the sore-beset, blind-sided, middle class. . .. The arts and the universities got marched through and vandalized by the cultural Marxists. American youth was inveigled into a cult of sexual bamboozlement and race-hatred, and politics entered a toxic zone of totalistic polarity. Our nation’s motto seemed to change from E. Pluribus Unum to Anything Goes and Nothing Matters. And then, in 2016, Donald Trump entered the scene.
Mr. Kunstler’s approach to these matters, with comic brilliance, helps audiences understand what it will take for America to recover a viable reality-based common culture and a country worth defending.
Biography
James Howard Kunstler is the author of over twenty books, including notably The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic and the four-book World Made by Hand novel series, a fictional depiction of the post-oil American future. His non-fiction has focused on town planning and the predicaments of suburbia, the financial recklessness of recent times, and the techno-narcissism that drives our wishful thinking about problem-solving.
Before hunkering down to write books, Mr. Kunstler was a newspaper reporter and an editor at Rolling Stone Magazine. His articles appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, The Atlantic, and The American Conservative.
He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT and many other colleges, and he has appeared before professional organizations such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, The Municipal Arts Society of New York, and the National Building Museum in Washington. His media hits include The Commonwealth Club and the Tucker Carlson Show on Fox News.
His latest book, the novel Look, I’m Gone, is a comedy set in the fall of 1963, the week of the JFK assassination, featuring the late JD Salinger in his first appearance as a fictionalized character.
Mr. Kunstler was born and raised in Manhattan, a subject he wrote about in his 2023 memoir Young Man Blues, Notes on a Nervous Adolescence. He writes a popular twice-weekly conservative blog on Substack, aptly named, “Clusterf*ck Nation”.
Mr. Kunstler lives in the upper Hudson Valley of upstate New York.
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