Forgoing the caricature of rurality as frighteningly remote and disconnected, Somebody Somewhere also nails the liminality of town and country, for many.

The “deeply rooted community” is, in reality, at least as often as not, a cesspit of nasty gossips, an echo chamber in which minor misunderstandings amplify until they prevent people from seeing each other accurately, or at all. As for the identities that drive so much of our politics, they are a necessary part of the naming and dismantling of

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Yet I didn’t sense a worry that things had gone awry; in fact, it was by passing through these communities that I accessed an emotion at the core of conservatism: why would I change anything?