America's Fastest-Dying Towns
Decades from now, the United States will be wildly different, even unrecognizable. Some of the most dramatic changes will occur in regions few thought were especially vulnerable to climate change at all.
Abrahm Lustgarten • On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America
We can’t reduce our country’s economic problems to a matter of education, and we can’t chalk up today’s brutal job market to globalization and technological change, either. Economic forces framed as inexorable, like the acceleration of global trade, are often the result of policy decisions such as the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA
... See moreMatthew Desmond • Poverty, by America
The rural population is declining, from more than half of the US population in 1910 to just 20% in 2010. The abandoned main streets show the wear and tear of an economy that has shifted away from rural people, and of public policy that has forgotten to pay attention.
The great American fallout: how small towns came to resent cities ...
But these tasks of meaning making require the small town, precisely, not to change too fast. Meanwhile, we demand that such places upend their entire local economy as soon as their fragile node in the regional economy is disrupted, often by some far-off decision over which the town had no control. It’s impossible. A place will certainly be grumpy i... See more
phil christman • Small-Town USA
the small industries of the inner cities were being replaced by artists and the smooth affluence that sometimes follows and imitates artists.
Rebecca Solnit • A Field Guide to Getting Lost
You are not your job. And soon, you won't have one.
Carmen Van Kerckhovecarmenvankerckhove.substack.com