From Kansas, with love: like it or not, my home defies stereotypes

The town is the place where you learn the value of a dollar, the meaning of a hard day’s work, before you find your true life in the city. Its continuance after you leave, in turn, symbolizes the unchanging reality of these moral verities: Superman never goes mad with power because Smallville is still there, steadying him at a distance. This mythic... See more

Tommy was watching TV these days, and seeing finally how this shit is everywhere you look. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par, the long-termed war of trying to shame the land people into joining America. Meaning their version, city. TV being the slam book of all times, maybe everybody in the city was just going along with it

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Whereas most people his age found it pleasant or amusing to reconnect with the long-lost friends now finding each other on Facebook, Jack experienced this same phenomenon as a kind of deep threat. In Chicago, he is not the same person he was in Kansas—he has tattooed his body and changed his whole persona and walled off that part of his personal st

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And then there were my people, middle-class white people. It was as though many of us didn’t know how to be this other kind of person, this person who could speak of big dreams, of high ideals, of deep emotions, as though something more small-scale and sarcastic was the reduced version of self that remained to us. I’ve had great visionary companion

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