“Rigid thinking is a trauma response.”[22]

Deaths of despair are disproportionately concentrated in places where misinformation spreads rampantly—in high-poverty communities with low college education attainment, scarce access to local doctors, and scant local news. Small Ohio cities like the Springfields, Urbanas, and Marysvilles are places that tend to be the most overlooked by the

What did all the non-reckoning with such toxic secrets have to do with the supersizing of our polarization and outrage? Was it that the secrets we bury are the same things we are most apt to fear? As Diana Zuckerman, the research psychologist, put it, “If you know it from your personal experience, then it doesn’t seem so outrageous to accuse other

“There is open disdain here for any of the suffering in our [rural] region, [and when you point out the suffering,] it’s seen as a provincial elevation of whiteness.”

Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 2024 book, Stolen Pride. The left-behind find themselves trapped in what she calls “a pride paradox,” a bootstrap mentality where they tend to blame themselves rather than the corporations and government laissez-faire that left them high and dry. “Doubly blocked, they become vulnerable to structural shame,” and more

Playing on a tribal craving for community and belonging, conspiracies can be a balm for the part of the brain prone to storytelling, symbols, and self-deception. “Our brains were designed for an earlier time, for when we really needed the security of our tribe for survival, so as humans we tend to ignore stuff that interferes with our ability to

Angus Deaton tried to pinpoint it when he said that too many middle-aged white Americans have “lost the narrative of their lives.” But even the Nobel-winning economist couldn’t quite nail the change, calling it “something like a loss of hope, a loss of expectations of progress.”[27] And while studies show that rural people are generally more

“People take their truths from other people they trust; they don’t use evidence to decide what’s true,” Kingsolver told me. But because national news is manufactured in cities, and rural people feel condescended to by city people, they’ve become so frustrated with a system that has proven itself impotent to correct problems that they think the only

the journalist’s creed to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”