As Craigslist, Google, and Facebook usurped most of what newspapers counted on for ad revenue, my beloved industry cratered in all but the urban power centers. Non-city people like John began identifying more with national politics and less with their geographic communities and the kinds of shared narratives that once dominated newspapers,

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

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

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

“But they feel threatened because the world’s changing in ways they can’t understand. They worry they’ll be left out and what limited success they do have is going to be cut off. They see things through a lens of fear and scarcity.”

“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.”

As James Baldwin put it, “The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.”

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

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