These Dis-United States | The Nation

160th Anniversary Issue

Richard Kreitner

Let’s be frank: It’s a somewhat presumptuous name for a magazine. Adopting it may have been akin to what philosophers refer to as a “speech act,” meant to call into being the very thing referred to. Largely absent from pre–Civil War political rhetoric, which more often spoke of “the union” or “the republic,” the word nation appeared five times in Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address. Two years later, when the first issue rolled off the presses in July 1865, the Confederacy had been defeated and Lincoln murdered, and a fierce fight over whether the “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” would indeed see “a new birth of freedom” was just beginning. The Nation was founded to see that struggle through—and we will.

By the 1920s, there was still something a little incongruous in a magazine so named devoting hundreds of pages over three years to an extensive meditation on each of the separate states. Penned by some of the most illustrious writers of the period—W.E.B. Du Bois on Georgia, Edmund Wilson on New Jersey, Sherwood Anderson on Ohio, Willa Cather on Nebraska, H.L. Mencken on Maryland, Sinclair Lewis on Minnesota, Theodore Dreiser on Indiana—the essays in that series, “These United States,” explored the rich history, geography, and character of those minor subdivisions supposedly effaced by the Civil War. The country was often depicted as “one vast and almost uniform republic,” the editors observed in an introductory note in 1922. But that left out what made American life interesting: “What riches of variety remain among its federated commonwealths? What distinctive colors of life among its many sections and climates and altitudes?”

In perusing the following dispatches from “These Dis-United States,” as we’re calling the series this time around, you may well be struck by how similar the experiences of this moment are in many states across this bruised and battered land. Asked to address “the fraying of the ties that once bound us to one another as Americans (or, as often, did not),” 50 of our best writers and artists depict local textures, practices, landmarks, and institutions everywhere being gutted, steamrolled, defunded, eviscerated. Here we get firsthand testimony, from Maine to Hawaii, of the acceleration of a decades-long project to hollow out government at every level—and of the devastating effects of that project on our national life. Among other things, these pieces tell a story of the aggressive erasure of difference. Still, as Judy Chicago puts it in the title of her hand-embroidered contribution, “We’re All in the Same Boat”—even if some of us are doing everything we can to keep it afloat, while others, for profit or pleasure, try to capsize it.

The editors’ note from 1922 ends with a statement of hope that while “artificial…distinctions” between states would eventually be “assimilated,” more authentic differences would remain:

Though centralization and regimentation may be a great convenience to administrators, they are death to variety and experiment and, consequently, in the end to growth. Better have the States a little rowdy and bumptious, a little restless under the central yoke, than given over to the tameness of a universal similarity.

So, too, today. Many of the pieces that follow portray the states as the necessarily circumscribed plots in which the seeds of some new form of individual and collective liberation might take root—a new birth of freedom, quite different from that imagined by Lincoln and supported by the founders of this magazine, but one that can emerge only from local practices of connection, conversation, organizing, and experimentation—the rowdier the better. We are still calling this nation into being, making an old country anew.

Dixie, USA

Ashley M. Jones

in alabama, i learned the truth of human duality and i learned the truth of human tenderness. i learned that the river’s current is a currency we share but often abuse—think of the old iron bridge at the cahaba—there, above the waters which make us the most biodiverse, waters which literally make space for every little organism to live, eat, make babies, and die in nature’s way—there, men of the stars and bars planned to plant bombs, corrupt seeds in the belly of a church in birmingham. faced with so much wonder, the flow of the river filling their ears with the most raucous and peacemaking sound, how did their minds see anything like hate?

what flag makes the shape of this particular paradox?

the very first time the american flag made me swell with pride or fear or love or, if i’m honest, with tears, was the day i saw it hanging, strangely and swinging from the apex of the ladders of the fire truck which carried my father’s coffin. that day, a may first i’ll never forget, but which i wish would disappear from my memory, i saw the flag flying in the breeze, starkly bright against a gray, cloudy sky, my own body dwarfed in the black suv my cousin drove as we made our way from the funeral to the graveside service. the flag, which let me know my dad was a hero. the flag, which let me know that this country was grateful for his service, for every time he ran into a building’s deadly flames, for every time he started an iv, for every time he stopped someone’s overdose before it claimed them.

the flag, which also knew he was a black man.

which also knew, as a child, that he was hit by rocks and fists because the white children didn’t want integration. which also knew his great pride in his race. which knew his high jumps and joy when he hopped with his que brothers. which knew he had, in his very last job, his retirement job from birmingham fire and rescue as assistant chief, become the first black fire chief in midfield. in 2020. that flag saw me, too—

first black poet laureate of alabama. first person of color poet laureate of alabama. 31 and the youngest poet laureate of alabama. the flag saw me, too, in the alabama state capitol at my commissioning. was the flag there in 1930 when the first alabama poet laureate was commissioned? there we were, masked against a silent, brutal killer. there we were, without our hero in a chamber lined with the larger-than-life white portraits of so many governors who did not stand up for black people,

or, who literally stood in doorways to block us.

there, i was commissioned, little black me, and there was the podium where i gave my speech, and there, right above my sprawling afro, the marble plaque commemorating our state’s secession from the union. jefferson davis’ ghost slithered in the room. but the court square auction block ancestors were there. and my family was there, and my friends were there, and my father in heaven was there, and my poems were there, and my whole life was there as a testament that the whole confederate history could be swallowed like a piece of unchewed food and i could make use of its waste.

in alabama, i learned that there is something greater than a flag.

Ashley M. Jones is the first person of color and the youngest person to serve as Poet Laureate of Alabama. She is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Lullaby for the Grieving (Hub City Press, 2025).

When Boom Goes Bust

Tom Kizzia

Greenlanders weighing President Trump’s annexation offer might want to consider the present state of America’s existing resource colony, Alaska, as it struggles with flatlined budgets, crumbling schools, and an exodus of workers and young families.

We thought we were prepared for this inevitable period of decline in oil production. In 1976, after the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, the state created a permanent fund to invest some of the windfall for future generations. Annual dividends paid to all residents profoundly reduced income inequality.

Today, the Alaska Permanent Fund has grown to some $80 billion, and the earnings help pay for the government in a state with no income tax. But the fund doesn’t provide nearly enough revenue for both the state budget and the dividends, which remain popular across the political spectrum.

In 2018, Republican Mike Dunleavy strode into the governor’s office with a promise to double or triple everyone’s dividends. This would have required absurdly deep spending cuts, or general taxes like nearly every other state imposes. But Dunleavy swore to veto any new tax.

The problem is compounded by Alaska’s taxation rates on mining and oil production, which have remained low since resource companies effectively captured the legislative process in the 1980s. This year, Alaska expects to shave $600 million off of oil companies’ tax bills to compensate for low oil prices. Last year, amid a mining boom, the state actually paid miners more (through tax settlements) than it got back from license tax revenue.

Dunleavy’s solution? Ever more resource development projects, promoted by more state subsidies—including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, building a $44 billion natural gas pipeline, and accessing untapped copper deposits with a 200-mile road along the untrammeled Brooks Range, right through the caribou-hunting grounds of Native villages.

Meanwhile, Native fishing camps sit empty because salmon runs have disappeared, and remote villages collapse as the permafrost melts—problems linked to burning the very fossil fuels whose extraction the state subsidizes. Tourism, a growth industry, has softened the anti-park sentiment that emerged on the right in the 1970s, but the insatiably expanding cruise industry is inspiring new resentments in coastal towns.

One source of optimism is Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, which put moderate bipartisan coalitions narrowly in charge of the Legislature this year. And the state’s small population (less than 750,000) allows the kind of face-to-face campaigning that helped reelect US Senator Lisa Murkowski, one of the few independent Republicans in the MAGA-dominated Congress.

Dunleavy predicted a “golden age” for the state with the reelection of Donald Trump, but so far cratering oil prices have cost Alaska’s budget hundreds of millions of dollars. Deadlock, social decline, and life at the mercy of commodity prices may look unattractive to Greenland’s 57,000 residents, but the model evidently appeals to the Trump administration. Trump officials have reportedly considered offering annual $10,000 cash dividends to Greenlanders, paid for out of anticipated resource revenues, to replace the at least $600 million in free healthcare, education, and other annual subsidies that Denmark provides.

Watch out, fellow Northerners—the next “golden age” could be yours.

Tom Kizzia is the author of three nonfiction books on Alaska, including Pilgrim’s Wilderness, and a former Anchorage Daily News reporter.

Political Theatrics

Tom Zoellner

When the Arizona Senate’s Government Committee met in February to consider a bill mandating that cities and counties assist with ICE raids, state Senator Jake Hoffman (who is also a member of the Republican National Committee) took the opportunity to ham it up for the cameras, ranting about how “mass deportations are wildly popular with people who are in every party.”

If Hoffman sounded like he was auditioning for a job in the Trump White House instead of governing, he was only joining a troupe of lawmakers who are exploiting the well-known “C-SPAN effect” that has now arrived at Arizona Capitol Television: the propensity for legislative discourse to become more combative and emotional when it’s conducted in front of the cameras.

Say this for times of disunion: They create entertaining theater. In the run-up to the Civil War, congressmen of all persuasions paid close attention to how they were covered in the press. Many made incendiary floor speeches designed not to find solutions but to win the applause of distant audiences. The term bunk comes from an 1820 speech about slavery delivered by a representative from Buncombe County, North Carolina, who explained that he was not “speaking to the House, but to Buncombe.”

Such is now the dynamic on Arizona Capitol Television, a streaming service formerly watched only by lobbyists and government junkies. In Donald Trump’s second term, however, it has become a stage for Republicans to create viral clips that show their fealty to the MAGA agenda. Committee hearings, once restricted to the dull grind of process and the exchange of courtesies, have become noteworthy for their Buncombe quality.

“This year there’s a heightened sense of, I don’t know what you’d call it… assholery by the Republicans,” state Senator Analise Ortiz, a Democrat from the west Phoenix suburbs, told me.

While some see that assholery rooted in self-confidence, a better explanation might be insecurity. Arizona Republicans are keenly aware of the price to be paid for failing to live up to Trumpian standards. One of the very first US senators to be ousted from the GOP over such an offense was the seemingly untouchable Jeff Flake, who angered Trump in 2017 by publishing a MAGA-skeptical book called (in a nod to Phoenix icon Barry Goldwater) The Conscience of a Conservative. An ensuing Twitter barrage by the president sent Flake’s popularity diving and ended his reelection bid. A similar purge of those seen as insufficiently ardent ring-kissers has virtually eliminated moderate Republicans from the Arizona Legislature.

The old-school conservatives who used to compose the ideological backbone of Arizona government have effectively disappeared, offering barely a murmur of dissent to the MAGA takeover of the Legislature—and of Arizona Capitol Television. “It’s so transparent what they’re doing,” lamented Stacey Pearson, a longtime Democratic consultant. “These are scripted clip-and-share moments. The Republicans are hoping their antics go viral, but this performative governing shtick is likely to backfire on them.”

Tom Zoellner is the author of Rim to River: Looking Into the Heart of Arizona.

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Child, Laborer

Alice Driver

Walk the land in rural towns like Green Forest, Arkansas, down dirt roads among clusters of homes, and you will hear Spanish, Marshallese, Vietnamese, Laotian. A woman from Guatemala will tell you that rent is $300 a month as she sits on a sagging couch in a town of nearly 3,000, where almost half that many people work at Tyson’s processing plant.

The children arrived as unaccompanied minors. The children speak Indigenous languages. The children speak Spanish. Teachers whisper about some students, weary from the night shift, who sleep through class. Eventually, many disappear from school, their lives given over to the night shift. These kids live in the shadows, afraid and silent. But if you stay late enough, after dark, you will see them leaving for work, like ghosts in the night, heading to the plant where they will handle skin, fat, bone, and blood.

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Politicians say that children will solve the labor shortage. As Project 2025 puts it, “Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs.”

In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which imposed restrictions on child labor. Yet my home state of Arkansas has already begun rolling them back. In 2023, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed the Youth Hiring Act. Arkansas no longer verifies the ages of children between 14 and 16 who take a job. Sanders’s communications director declared parental permission an “arbitrary burden,” so the paperwork that served as a record of the names and ages of minors working in the state no longer exists.

In 2023, a US Department of Labor investigation found six children between the ages of 13 and 17 working at a Tyson plant in Green Forest. In 2024, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families published a report noting that child labor violations in Arkansas increased 266 percent between 2020 and 2023. In October 2024, a woman in Green Forest filed an anonymous complaint to alert authorities to child labor problems. The woman, a mother of middle schoolers, overheard children between 11 and 13 discussing their employment at the Tyson chicken processing plant. The night shift is also known as the cleaning shift, when hazardous chemicals are used to clean the large, sharp machinery. The complaint said she allegedly heard the children discussing whether they could get their paychecks from the ATM.

These children who move through the Arkansas night, their small, strong hands doing dangerous jobs, should haunt us.

Alice Driver is the author of Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company.

Magic and Survival

Julian Brave NoiseCat

“Our culture is our superpower.” That’s what my friend the Cook Island artist and voyager Numangatini Mackenzie told me before the lights went down for the world premiere of Shrek translated into te reo Māori, the first language of Aotearoa (New Zealand). As we talked, kids bustled up and down the bleachers and around the floor of the gymnasium, which had been converted from basketball court to a theater for Māoriland, an Indigenous film festival put on in Otaki, a sleepy town 45 minutes northwest of the New Zealand capital, Wellington. All around, ahead, behind, to our left and right, the hum of Māori, with their tattooed arms and faces, their long hair and high buns, and their bodies adorned in bone, shell, and greenstone, speaking that percussive vowel-strewn Eastern Polynesian tongue, te reo, or “the language.”

To my shock, the little ones were fluent. I will never forget the coo of a little Māori boy calling the dragon a “taniwha.” Meanwhile, the elders seemed to chew the language as they tried to find their words, which they tended to intersperse with English.

Across the Native world, there are few gymnasiums full of Indigenous peoples speaking our languages. And in the few where we do, it is almost always the opposite, with younger generations struggling to understand and communicate with our elders.

Less than a lifetime ago, te reo, like many other languages, was running headlong towards what is widely considered a foregone conclusion for Indigenous peoples and our cultures: death.

But that night, as a gym full of grinning Māori took in the tale of a green ogre and talking donkey rescuing a princess—first from that taniwha, then from Lord Farquaad, and finally from the prejudices of a magical society hellbent on destroying all magical things—with plot points, pathos, and punch lines all delivered in their language, you would never have known it. Today, there are te reo actors, te reo rappers, te reo broadcasters, te reo street signs, te reo dissertations, te reo memes. And now a generation of Māori tykes raised in te reo.

To me, this feels like a dream. I spent the last year-and-a-half promoting my first film, Sugarcane, which documents the unspoken atrocities and enduring intergenerational traumas wrought by the segregated missionary school where my family was sent to unlearn our Indian language and ways. Virtually all Indigenous peoples across this continent were torn from our cultures and one another by similar institutions. “Kill the Indian, save the man,” that was the idea, according to the American architect of the policy. My travels with Sugarcane took me from Indian reservations across Canada and the United States to the Canadian Parliament, the White House, and the 97th Academy Awards, before it landed me in Aotearoa. It was, at times, a hard journey, and not just because it was so personal. How do you convey to audiences who know nothing of this history that there was a national—no, global—conspiracy to wipe Indigenous peoples and our cultures off the face of this earth? That the last of these schools for Indigenous children didn’t actually close in the 19th century; they closed in 1997? That this is why we don’t understand our elders, our languages, and ourselves? That it could happen again? That maybe it already is happening?

As I write this, my flight from Aotearoa is touching down in Los Angeles, the American factory of global popular culture built in no small part on Western tales of gunslinging cowboys slaughtering savage Natives. California epitomizes many quintessentially American phenomena, like Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and killing Indians. In fact, arguably no state in the union did the last better. Between 1769 and 1800, gulag conditions in Spanish missions cut the coastal California Indian population in half. Not to be outdone, during the first decade of American rule in the 1850s, Californians subjugated as many as 20,000 Natives, including 4,000 children, using them as farm hands, domestic servants, and sex slaves. Through 1873, the state bankrolled militias to the tune of $1 million. Those militias murdered as many as 16,094 Indigenous peoples, according to University of California Los Angeles historian Benjamin Madley. When the ’49ers came to pan for gold and hunt Indians, there were some 90 languages spoken in the state. Today, half of those are endangered. The other half are extinct.

Sometimes, I don’t know how our people survived. And I’m never certain how we should proceed. But my friend Numa down in Aotearoa has his theory. “Our culture is our superpower,” he said as we sat in a room full of Indigenous peoples who were supposed to be culturally dead, lit up with laughter as a magical story told in a language they were supposed to forget unfolded on the big screen.

Julian Brave NoiseCat’s first film, Sugarcane, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. His first book, We Survived the Night, a work of creative nonfiction on Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada today, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in October.

The Bighorn Trap

Sarah Boxer

A couple months ago, I watched a local newscast about efforts to revive and disperse the population of Colorado’s state animal, the bighorn sheep. The Department of Parks and Wildlife lured the bighorns near Colorado Springs with tasty treats, dropped a net on them, and took them to a distant plot of land. The video was upsetting. It showed the hapless bighorns freaking out in the net before being wrestled to the ground and loaded into trucks for the trip to a former burn scar west of Pueblo that’s now grassland. But when the sheep got to their new home, I have to admit, they looked pretty darn happy.

Still, the video left me with a sinking feeling. Something about those bighorns in the net reminded me of another endangered population two hours north. Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration, the Pentagon designated Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora as a “processing center” for undocumented immigrants. By April 2025, Colorado Public Radio reported, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had broadened its efforts in the state, and many immigrants with no criminal record were being “caught in a wide net.” I know this analogy between trapped animals and trapped humans is imperfect and unsettling in its own right. But a net is a net. And as disturbing as that bighorn video was, it’s much more disturbing to realize that Colorado’s immigrants are being treated less thoughtfully than the freaked-out sheep. Another key difference: All the bighorns were soon set free.

Sarah Boxer is the cartoonist behind In the Floyd Archives, Mother May I?, Hamlet: Prince of Pigs, ​and Anchovius Caesar.

Getting Back to Work

David Bromwich

For the past 25 years, we have been divided in an alternating pattern of roughly 51 percent majorities, and the same mistake is made by each successive winner: Go all the way with your program while you can—implement now, explain later. What the winners have forgotten is that you cannot govern for long without the consent of the 49 percent.

Democratic lawmakers for the time being are stunned, scattered, and immobilized, in a region between bewilderment and dismay. The more serious among Republican lawmakers have shown themselves docile in obedience to the edicts of a president who is acting more like a dictator than most people, even in his own party, seem to have thought possible. But the serial enormities of Donald Trump’s first 75 days form a pattern that is not built to last. A few Republican lawmakers—it only takes a few—will come to oppose the most clearly anti-constitutional of his orders; and Democrats will relearn a language that does not triangulate the mental habits of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street.

As surely as Joe Biden was self-deceived when he thought no one would notice three years of uncontrolled immigration and the conduct of new wars two at a time, Donald Trump will overstep the limits of popular sentiment with exorbitant tariffs, the capture and transportation of US residents to foreign prisons, and the firing of government workers where the loss can be felt and resented by millions of ordinary people on the other end. What tactics can Americans who want a saner society use?

Speak in a language that is political rather than therapeutic. Do not expect people to believe that “trauma” is a daily risk for all Americans who are not white. Try, in fact, to speak to all Americans—not as the sum of their racial, ethnic, religious, and gender-identified parts, but as people who want to get on with their lives unmolested and reasonably healthy. For the purposes of democracy, recognize that lawfare was a shortcut to political power that deserved to fail. As for “resistance”: The job of an opposing party is opposition. As soon as it acquires a double identity as half party, half movement, anyone who objects to either half will be tempted to give up the whole.

A few obvious maxims follow for the defenders of liberal society. Be specific in your criticisms of policy. Stake out two or three positions of principle—on free speech, or government by law, or freedom from cruel and unusual punishments—and state the practical effect of those positions. For example: “You should never lose a job for an idiocy you published online under the age of 18.” Refer steadily to acts and the officials answerable for those acts, and, wherever possible, omit the shorthand “Donald Trump”; it may seem like a labor-saving device, but it has failed before, and it is time to get back to work. It is not self-evident, nor should it be, that you are the people who deserve to govern. Those who would govern have a responsibility to persuade.

David Bromwich teaches literature at Yale University.

New World Sourdough

JoAnn Balingit

Since the 2024 presidential election, I have bought no bread. It’s not a fast. Not grief. Not “some weird penance,” as a friend described her failure to sing in the shower since Election Day. It’s a freedom.

“Mother Delilah,” as I named my sourdough starter, is soothingly predictable: She behaves just as the baker Bryan Ford said she would in his book New World Sourdough. She’s ritual, a prayer.

Since November: sourdough boules, bagels, waffles, English muffins. Sometimes two baking days a week. We make music, poems, syllabi, Facetime calls, gardens, love. We make meals for loved ones. The youngest member of this household dances and does his own laundry.

As I stretch the fabulous mass in my hands, turn the bowl a quarter, stretch and turn again, I wonder: When I circle the wagons in this way, do I isolate myself from others? Am I embracing reality, or ignoring it?

It’s hard to ignore disunity, living in Delaware. My state embraces having been the first to ratify the Constitution and enter the Union. Less often do we share that it did so as a slave state and continued to hold people in bondage through the Civil War, while almost 12,000 Delawareans fought for the Union. An estimated 2,000 Delawareans fought for the Confederacy meanwhile.

I think of “Red Hannah,” the whipping post displayed at the Sussex County Courthouse until 2020, when protests forced it down. The last public flogging was in 1952, and Delaware had corporal punishment on the books until 1972, long after it was banned in other states. Cut almost two centuries ago, the Delaware & Chesapeake Canal splits the state into northern and southern halves, and that water continues to roughly delimit the social and political divisions in the state today. Delaware has more to do with the history of American disunion than we like to think.

With the blade of my palm, I flip the dough onto the counter and press my bench knife through its soft center to create two loaves.

The word disunited makes me think of little plots of forested land surrounded by developments of tract homes and many-laned roadways. And it makes me think of our Delaware subspecies of Eastern box turtle. I used to see them all the time. Fifteen years ago, one lived in our yard and migrated across the road into our neighbors’ shrubs each morning, then back to our house each evening. Now I have not seen a common box turtle in five years. Since 1968, the box turtle has declined 75 percent in the Ecology Woods, a University of Delaware 35-acre research site, indicating that it is vulnerable to extinction statewide. Its habitat is being torn apart.

In my kitchen in northern Delaware, this defiant bread is already rising. Amid fragmentation, I am here for those who need me, here for those whom I need: family, friends, artists who matter so much to me. We keep us safe.

New world, I think. Future. Hang on, threatened trees. Hang on, sacred rock. Hang on, sturgeon. Hang on, hatchling turtles. I love you, cypress springs. Hang in there when I am gone, my beloved granddaughters.

Living in isolated patches, confined to itself, a species cannot survive. Hang on.

JoAnn Balingit served as Delaware’s poet laureate from 2008 to 2015. Her poems and essays appear in Poetry, The Common, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.

Crocodile Tears

Lauren Groff

Floridians who have been paying attention predicted the current coup that’s taking place in Washington, DC. After all, we in the Sunshine State have been slowly crushed under similar authoritarian forces for years. Ron DeSantis is only the most recent of Florida’s leaders who have been proudly and loudly hostile to their own citizens, eliminating DEI programs, choking out public education, and waging wars on books and people’s uteruses and the LGBT community and the environment. DeSantis has maniacal dreams of developing our super-fragile protected ecosystems into golf courses and hotels—of all the idiotic things to sacrifice the manatees to. I live in Gainesville, in the north-­central part of the state, home to the University of Florida, and for years the school has been shedding brilliant academics who couldn’t bear the inanity of trying to teach here. Meanwhile, my friends who work in the nonprofit sector are anguished because even progressive nonprofits, to punish Floridians for their choice of leaders, are starving the state of philanthropic funds—which, of course, ends up hurting not the leaders but the people who can no longer be served. Our state has been bleeding out. We have gone wan and dizzy with it. This confuses non-­Floridians into believing that wan and dizzy is our natural condition.

That said, not all Floridas are the same. Geographically, this state is larger than Greece or South Korea; if it were a European country, it would be the 10th-largest in terms of population, just behind Poland. This state is so large, so unruly, that our realities will always be fractured. This past March, my younger son and I went to Miami Beach for spring break. It is always discombobulating to go from the scrub pines and swampy subtropics of north-­central Florida to tropical Miami, with its man-made beaches, its signs in Spanish and Haitian Creole, its masses of tourists with blistering sunburns. But this trip showed me a stark divide: The feeling of doom I’d carried around in the north, constantly upheld by my righteously enraged neighbors, vanished in the city of hedonism. There was no protest graffiti, nobody marching, no billboards—no indicators at all of the crisis the country is in. I was startled enough about this that I asked my food-tour guide, a Macedonian immigrant named Faruk, about the situation. He said gently, “In Miami, nobody cares about anything that happens outside of Miami.” When I asked him why, he smiled and said, “Money.”

Lauren Groff is the author of five novels and three story collections, including Brawler, which will be published in February 2026.

Not So Divided

Hannah Riley

The state’s response was swift and harsh. It brought a sweeping RICO prosecution against 61 people, criminalizing acts of mutual aid and labeling protest as terrorism. A forest defender was killed by police, shot 14 times in their tent. Millions of dollars were wasted, the referendum was mired in an appeals court, and acres of forest were drowned under concrete. The end result? The facility was built. The movement fractured.

That’s one way to see it.

But, ultimately, to frame this story as one of a movement unraveling is to miss what’s happened. The intensity of the state’s repression correlates to the intensity of the popular opposition. It proves that we are not as divided as those in power need us to be.

Nowhere does the current state of disunion seem more evident than in Georgia, home to the widely protested Cop City, a $120-million-plus police militarization center. Years of sustained opposition had worked to block its construction in a Metro Atlanta–area forest: Land defenders lived in the trees they hoped to save; protesters destroyed machines that were to be used to raze the forest; a coalition tried to block construction through a democratic referendum.

If the people of Georgia wanted Cop City, its backers would not have needed to meet protesters with riot gear and police dogs. They would not have needed to treat a march in which people carried puppets and planted seedlings as a military confrontation, responding with flash-bang grenades and tear gas. The state would not have sent armed police to raid the encampments, to tear down kitchens and gardens and mutual aid tents. They would not have set up surveillance cameras outside protesters’ homes.

The overblown response came because the opposition to Cop City pulled back the veil on what policing is, revealing to more and more people the ways in which public money is funneled into expanding state violence while communities go without basic needs. People began to understand that the police state is not a response to chaos but a machine designed to manufacture it, to ensure that people remain fractured, isolated, and unable to build the kind of power that threatens the status quo. Cop City became a national flash point, uniting us across struggles and geographies. Residents of other cities began to draw connections to their own fights, recognizing that the same narratives were playing out in their hometowns, too.

As this country descends further into fascism, police will not be there to prevent harm or address these crises. At every site of resistance, from eviction blockades to deportation defenses to demonstrations in the streets, police will defend capital and state power with military-grade weaponry and surveillance technology. The Stop Cop City movement was more than just a protest and bigger than Atlanta: It was the convergence of many different struggles. It made clear that we are not breaking apart; we are holding together.

Hannah Riley is a writer and activist based in Atlanta.

Outlying Islands

Tom Coffman

For reasons that are both historical and intensely contemporary, Hawai‘i feels increasingly out of place in a discussion of the 50 federated states.

First, consider its separate history. Settled by Polynesians between one and two millennia ago, its disparate islands were slowly united into a complex chiefdom, while enduring a demographic cataclysm on contact with the West. Penetrated by Christian missionaries in the early 19th century, Hawai‘i evolved into a constitutional monarchy. Beleaguered by the seagoing imperialisms of Britain, France, and Russia, it was taken over step-by-step by the United States. Retooled into an armed fortress, Hawai‘i became the target of the attack that clinched the United States’ participation in World War II, during which it was placed under martial law. In the aftermath, a radical union movement and the Democratic Party took control of Hawaiian politics. Pulled by the imperatives of the civil rights movement, pushed by the Cold War, Hawai‘i became, in 1959, the first island state of the US and the first majority Polynesian- and Asian-ancestry state.

Since the mid-1960s, Hawai‘i has been perpetually conflicted by the speed and scale of development in the state and the degradation of its intangible resources. Partly as a response, partly from an instinct for survival, Native Hawaiians began making a startling resurgence in the mid-1970s. Lands and lifestyle have been protected by widespread protests. Suppressed history has been unearthed and popularized. Cultural practices have been retrieved, revalued, and normalized. The Hawaiian language has been rescued from the brink of extinction, and Indigenous rights have been incorporated into state-level common law. In a stunning project that has gone global, ancient practices of oceanic voyaging by non-­instrument navigation have been revived.

Today, Hawai‘i is one of the bluest states. But it is also a semi-separate outlier with a sturdy core of shared values. Against this history, Donald Trump emerges from stage right as an oddball caricature of the United States at its worst. When he invokes President William McKinley as his role model, he cites the bumbling man who, to the dismay of Native Hawaiians, signed the resolution of unilateral annexation. When he speaks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a time of great wealth, he reminds islanders of their long fight against the corporate stranglehold on the territorial economy. When by executive order he declares English the country’s official language, he challenges Hawai‘i’s constitutional designation of both English and Hawaiian as official languages. As he pursues his war against diversity, equity, and inclusion, he attacks the core values of Hawai‘i.

Turn any stone. In matters ranging from the plummeting numbers of Canadian and Japanese tourists to the rise in sea levels and the protection of species, Hawai‘i is predisposed to—is being driven toward—a greater self-sufficiency, not unlike other small countries around the world.

Tom Coffman is an author and documentary producer working on Hawai‘i politics, Hawaiian nationalism, and the Asian diaspora.

Vouchers vs. People

Luke Mayville

Earlier this year, for the first time in state history, Idaho lawmakers enacted a school voucher law that siphons funding from public schools in order to subsidize private school tuition. It was a tragic moment for the state’s public school system and an even worse moment for the state’s democracy.

House Bill 93—Idaho’s tax-credit-based voucher scheme—was overwhelmingly opposed by the public. In the first hearing on the bill, hundreds of Idahoans submitted testimony; citizens against the bill outnumbered those in support by a 10-to-1 margin.

The pattern continued after the bill arrived on Governor Brad Little’s desk. Before signing it into law, Little received tens of thousands of calls and e-mails, with 86 percent opposed to the bill. He signed it regardless.

What mattered more than the will of the people was the influence of billionaires like Betsy DeVos and Jeff Yass, who have financed aggressive smear campaigns against pro-public-­education legislators in both parties.

What do these billionaires want? Beyond the push to privatize education and to save children from secular, liberal “indoctrination,” there’s also what the journalist Jennifer Berkshire and the scholar Jack Schneider describe in their book The Education Wars as an attack on the basic ideal of free and equal citizenship—“part of a broader effort to undermine the American commitment to educating every child, no matter their circumstances.” The anti-slavery politician Thaddeus Stevens once called public education “the great equalizer.” The oligarchs would prefer that we not be equalized.

In Idaho, the people’s fight against vouchers isn’t over. Pro-voucher groups have made clear that their next goal is to remove all guardrails from the new law and to expand the program from its current $50 million per year to an estimated $339 million per year—enough to decimate funding for public schools.

Yet the ground is fertile for a countermovement. In the wake of the bill’s passage, with an unprecedented level of public awareness and outrage tied to the issue, supporters of public education planned town halls in every region of the state and launched a movement to demand “Not a Dollar More”—no new tax dollars for an expanded voucher program. At a town hall in rural Payette County, a local superintendent predicted that House Bill 93 would turn out to be “our Pearl Harbor moment, when we wake up and we see the danger.”

One can only hope. In Idaho and in every other state being steamrolled by the billionaire-driven voucher agenda, it will take a reinvigorated movement to protect the integrity of our public schools. That movement will need to be cross-partisan, and it will need to span the urban/rural divide. Most importantly, it will need to be a movement that doesn’t merely defend the status quo but reclaims the highest purpose of public education—in the words of the writer Marilynne Robinson, “the old project of creating a free people.”

Luke Mayville is a cofounder of Reclaim Idaho, an organization that has spearheaded successful campaigns to expand Medicaid and increase funding for public schools.

Blue Island

Chris Ware

In retrospect, driving with my 12-year-old daughter from our home near Chicago to an empty cornfield in southern Illinois to see the 2017 total solar eclipse, I should’ve been a little more alarmed by the number of Confederate flags we counted along the way. Four years later, when the pandemic seemed to have eased and we wanted to just go somewhere, anywhere, a day trip through central Illinois took us past not only more Stars and Bars but also “Trump 2024” placards and Trump-as-Rambo banners flapping over apartment balconies, as well as “Piss on Pritzker” lawn signs—all of which seemed a little overdone, given how laughably Trump had emceed the pandemic. (Also nasty, since I’d thought Governor JB Pritzker’s daily briefings were a heartwarmingly awkward spectacle of human anxiety and vulnerability, the corn-fed answer to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s officious, patronizing scolding.)

Illinois basically has two regions: Chicago and “downstate.” Dense Chicago is reliably Democratic, whereas downstate skews conservative, but rarely enough to flip the electoral switch. (The last time Illinois voted for a Republican president was in 1988.) A fragment of a street called Blue Island Avenue still runs southwest from Chicago toward the town of Blue Island (the name apparently inspired by the low moraine that early-19th-century travelers could see gently bellying up from what Frederick Law Olmsted called the “flat, miry and forlorn” Illinois landscape), a place that was then a day’s wagon ride to the city, where beleaguered immigrants could stop for a rest and a beer. Overlaid on the scar of a Native American trail, the route endures as a diagonal slice of space-time through the gridlocked blocks of Chicago and its suburbs.

“Blue Island,” however, could just as easily describe our state, bordered to the north by purple Wisconsin and to the east by reliably red Indiana. Illinois has the second-highest property taxes in the nation, and my painter and sculptor friends who migrated to Indiana over the past few years didn’t do so because of the weather. We’re losing population at an alarming rate: Between 2010 and 2022, Illinois disgorged more people than any other state (and, embarrassingly, many of them were African American, in a sort of reverse Great Migration to a more affordable—and less Chicago-level-policed—South).

Nowadays, my drive to the empty eclipse-viewing cornfield seems ominous. I find myself second-guessing my words, my thoughts self-braking. Did downstaters feel the same way during “cancel culture” and “woke” DEI? How can it be that nearly half of the American population voted for all of this?

I’m originally from Nebraska, and I love the Midwest. The brown-and-gray humility of its homes and streets, its flat talk averaging out from all corners of the world. I realize I live in a blue state, if not a blue island. But how did we all let ourselves get so red with anger at one another?

Chris Ware is an artist, writer, and regular contributor to The New Yorker. A traveling retrospective of his work began at the Centre Pompidou in 2022 and concludes this year at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Who’s Here?

Sofia Samatar

In the national imagination, Indiana is a place of comedy and horror. The lovable oddballs of Parks and Recreation make their home here, as do the children of Stranger Things, whose small town is menaced by an alien intelligence. This makes sense, as Indiana is closely associated with home: the exasperating home you ran away from, the vulnerable home you want to protect. It flickers in the heartland, where candlelight gleams through the sycamores.

Snow is falling on the first day of spring in the town where I was born. I walk with my head down, plowing into the wind, the Indiana stride. Sour joy at the toughness it takes. Other people have placid weather; they’re spoiled, shiftless—they wouldn’t last two weeks in this cold and cloudy dark. In her apartment in the retirement home, my mother picks out hymns on her electric keyboard. Over a jigsaw puzzle, we reminisce about the lost. Remember my cousin, who died a few years ago: his exuberance, his love of NASCAR, the noise and hot metal smell of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, eating fried chicken, tossing the bones about—that really got him, the schoolboy delight of throwing your trash on the ground. Remember my father, gone for a decade now, and how when I was a baby his coworker at the rubber factory called the cops on this African immigrant, accusing him of cannibalism. The officer pulling my dad from the line, the stares, the questions, the comedy and horror.

Of the many folk etymologies of the nickname Hoosier, my favorite traces it to “Who’s here?”—supposedly the call of early settlers when a stranger came to the door. It holds the echo of a knock-knock joke and the jumpiness of a scary movie: Who’s here, who’s already inside?

In the dining room of the retirement home, we eat delicious ribs that fall apart in your mouth and overboiled broccoli that falls apart on your fork. Pensioners pass with walkers, nodding their bleached, benignant heads, talking of church, crochet patterns, the granddaughter coming to fix the e-mail, and suddenly I wonder if there’s something profound in the TV versions of Indiana, a truth that can take form only in this folksy atmosphere. The modest job in the parks department with benefits, vacations, and the prospect of a dignified retirement—it’s not a joke, I realize, but a national nostalgia. The horror show, too, speaks to our common crises, dramatizing mental illness, experiments on children, a rotting landscape, and a predatory virtual world.

After dinner, snow is still whirling outside my mother’s window, bright in the beams of the back-door light. The bell rings. It’s her students, a middle-aged immigrant couple she volunteers to help with English once a week. Smiling, deferential, they brush off their coats. A lesson begins at my mother’s table, words detached and striving to find their grammar, soft, insistent flakes of language filling the air like snow. “I am.” “He is.” “She is.” “They are.” “We are.”

Sofia Samatar is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist.

Shrink the Aperture

Kaveh Akbar

The evergreen question of “How shall I live?” can feel immobilizing amid the calculated chaos of a despotic regime. So, too, can the unsatisfying mundanity of the only authentic answer: One moment at a time.

When the aperture on living gets too big, my instinct is to escape. Drugs and booze were great for that, allowing me to hover in blissful repose above my life’s unmanageability. But in recovery, I’ve lost my privileges to such luxurious flight.

What I have now is the ability to shrink my aperture. What I want is to arrest global fascism in its tracks and melt down every gun and instrument of war. But first: I will finish typing this sentence. If even that feels like too much, I can breathe in, then breathe out.

There is a desire now, I think, to find proportionally big, monolithic solutions to the big, monolithic evils of our murderous age. But waiting for superhero solutions to arrive and save us can diffuse our commitment to the trillion tiny, unsexy daily actions that actually make our lives bearable. Yeats on the Irish Civil War: “We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”

I live in Iowa and teach at a big state university directly in the crosshairs of the Trump regime. I’ve not witnessed any capitol-storming insurrections yet, but I have stood with a small group of earnest undergrads in front of our state Legislature as they read each other Palestinian poetry and chanted in the rain. I’ve not witnessed anyone step in front of a tank, but I did see a young hijabi at a different action respond to an anonymous challenge about the group’s stance on antisemitism—taking the mic, she confidently asserted that antisemitism has no place in any serious freedom movement.

Once, when asked by a young man for a solution to the political crises in her writing, Octavia Butler replied simply, “There isn’t one.” “No answer?” the student asked. “You mean we’re just doomed?” Butler responded, “There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

Other answers I have seen: A colleague who runs an international writers’ program, on hearing that the Trump State Department had gutted the program’s funding, immediately began organizing to protect current and future students. When four of Iowa’s international students also lost funding, our community rallied on their behalf; eventually, a federal judge reinstated their visas. Also: a young recovery fellow showing up to the home of a sick friend to fold laundry and wash dishes. My spouse saying goodnight every night to each of our animals and then to a box of our beloved cat’s ashes. My sister-in-law teaching my little nieces how to make zines.

I’m skeptical of anyone selling solutions that sound too big or too certain. Real action needs doing, not selling, so it’s motion I trust. When I stall, it means my aperture’s gotten too wide.

Yesterday my neighbor cooked me chile relleno and told me about painting in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Today I went over to a friend’s house, chased their little kids around the yard, and laid in the grass. When I finish writing this essay, I’ll put some shoes on, call a recovery newcomer, and take my dog to walk in the setting sun. One thing, then the next. For a long, long time.

Kaveh Akbar is the author, most recently, of the novel Martyr! Born in Tehran, he teaches at the University of Iowa.

The New CSA

Kevin Willmott

A little more than 20 years ago, I wrote and directed C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, a film that told an alternate history in which the South had won the Civil War and shaped the country in its own image.

Making the film alerted me to how Confederate ideology continues to influence American society. Although the South lost the Civil War, it was not until the 1960s that substantial changes occurred in Southern society. Ever since, the United States has been divided between those who accept the results—the enshrinement of equality in the Constitution—and those who don’t. Call them the USA and the CSA. Recently, the two countries have merged into one: The Confederacy has gobbled up the Union.

Lawrence, Kansas, where I live, was, like The Nation, founded by abolitionists. Our historic Massachusetts Street is named after the home state of its earliest settlers, who moved here in the 1850s to keep slavery from spreading to the Western territories. The fighting that followed, in the period known as “Bleeding Kansas,” was an early warning of the nationwide conflict that would come just a few years later.

The city has long celebrated this heritage. My children attended Free State High School. But after the Union victory in the Civil War, Lawrence became segregated, as did much of Kansas. It was, after all, the Topeka Board of Education whose resistance to integration compelled the Supreme Court to intervene in 1954. The free state became segregated because the South won the peace. Now the entire nation is capitulating to the new Confederate States of America.

The old CSA romanticized antebellum Southern life, as in Gone With the Wind. The new CSA also aims to return to an earlier period: the 1950s of Donald Trump’s youth, when white men were dominant, women were homemakers, African Americans held “Black jobs,” LGBTQ+ individuals were in the closet, and Latinos faced deportation.

The new CSA differs from the old in its nationwide presence. Unlike its predecessor, the new CSA ideology is both blatant and subtle. It can attract far-right hate groups as well as growing numbers of African Americans and Latinos.

The Trump administration’s ongoing attack on the federal bureaucracy and wholesale cancellation of government programs; the quest to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion policies; the erasure of Black history; and the reinstatement of Confederate names on military bases are all clear attempts to revive the white supremacy of the CSA. So is the clearly unconstitutional attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, as enshrined in the 14th Amendment, drawn up and ratified by the victors of the Civil War.

Promoting C.S.A. in Memphis shortly after its release, I sat for an interview at a Fox station where the Black anchors were shocked by the film and quietly warned me about showing it in the city. As I left the studio, a receptionist, an older white woman, told me, “The South will rise again.” Indeed, it has.

Kevin Willmott won an Academy Award for cowriting BlacKkKlansman. He has directed numerous feature films.

Blood and Bluegrass

Tarence Ray

On the morning of September 7, 2024, Joseph Allen Couch, a former Army Reserve engineer, walked into a gun store in London, Kentucky, and purchased a semiautomatic Cobalt AR-15 with a mounted sight and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. He then took position on a cliff ledge overlooking Interstate 75 and proceeded to spray live rounds into cars passing on the highway, injuring five people. Afterward, Couch disappeared into the surrounding woods and turned the gun on himself, while the state shut down its schools for days in the belief that the shooter was still on the loose.

How did Kentucky come to be the font of such despair and the scene of such carnage? To some extent, it has been this way from the beginning. Just over 250 years ago, settler pioneers like Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton summited the Appalachian crest and began streaming into the land south of the Ohio River Valley, a land sacred to the Shawnee. The Shawnee had obtained promises from the colonial authorities that this would never happen, and yet here were strange white men making strange markings on trees to denote a strange new concept: private property. The Shawnee leader Tecumseh recognized that if the white man was willing to break his promise to never settle the sacred wilderness of Kentucky, he would not stop until he reached the farthest reaches of the continent.

A century later, Kentucky was at the center of another national transformation. Slavery and “slave breeding” had become widespread in this so-called border state—Kentucky, in fact, had over 200,000 slaves by 1850—and yet Abraham Lincoln promised to keep the practice intact in exchange for the state’s loyalty to the Union during the Civil War. This exemption from the Emancipation Proclamation meant that Kentucky became the second-to-last state to adopt a constitution outlawing slavery. In the decades after the war, white supremacist paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan terrorized free Black people. The promise of racial equality was abandoned. It’s not a far leap from there to the 1954 prosecution of the white journalist Carl Braden on trumped-up charges of sedition—for the crime of helping a Black couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, buy a house in their Louisville neighborhood—and, more recently, to the murder of Breonna Taylor inside her own home.

In the decades after the Civil War, Kentucky sold off its numerous natural resources to corporate interests, all premised, in some way or other, on vice, alienation, and environmental rot: coal mining, tobacco farming, car manufacturing, horse racing, and bourbon. This made the state vulnerable to “natural” disasters, from floods to fires, sinkholes to tornadoes. But this may, paradoxically, provide the only hope for a brighter future: In the wake of such disasters, one finds efforts toward mutual aid and communal solidarity, the knitting together of new social bonds amid the wreckage of the old. It may be that such bonds are the only hope Kentucky has of reversing the tide of history and becoming sacred once again.

Tarence Ray is a cohost of the podcast Trillbilly Worker’s Party. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

The Big Uneasy

Sarah Jaffe

When people in the United States talk about disunion, they often refer to the Civil War, instinctively pitting the South against the rest of the country. The backward South, the story goes, is still fighting the “War of Northern Aggression.” It is the reservoir of all the nation’s racism.

I see some truth to this. Born in Boston and raised partly in South Carolina, I currently live in Republican-dominated Louisiana, where I can’t get a legal abortion and union membership ranks 44th in the nation. But I also live in New Orleans, where 80 percent of voters backed a workers’ bill of rights in the 2024 election, where union nurses have struck three times for a decent contract in recent months, and where a Palestine-themed Mardi Gras parade has rolled two years in a row.

That workers’ bill of rights had to be carefully written so as not to run afoul of state preemption laws—a problem familiar to people in the South, where Republican-dominated state legislatures ban localities from doing everything from raising the minimum wage to regulating traffic stops by police. Last year, I covered the struggle by organizers in Memphis to pass reforms after the brutal police killing of Tyre Nichols; once the Tennessee Legislature came back into session, it prioritized undoing the local ordinance. Governors and other state politicians have interfered in union elections in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Jeff Landry, our Republican governor, sent state troopers to clear homeless encampments in New Orleans even before a former soldier barreled his car down Bourbon Street early on New Year’s Day. After the crackdown, Landry seemed gleeful about his ability to over-police Mardi Gras.

It often feels like those of us in Southern cities are under attack by our own state governments. And yet I also recall this feeling from my time living in Northern cities. New York’s Fight for $15 campaign had to battle then-Governor Andrew Cuomo in order to raise the minimum wage, and Pennsylvania continues to block Philadelphia from enacting gun control.

Indeed, the way a state swings in presidential elections usually depends on whether the major urban areas—strongholds of Black people and immigrants, union members, and LGBTQ people—are populous enough to counterbalance the rest of the state. Georgia, the epitome of the Deep South, has become a key presidential battleground by virtue of Atlanta’s booming population.

When it’s a matter of going to war against their own populations, liberal mayors and city councils have plenty to answer for as well. The movement to stop the construction of Atlanta’s Cop City, a $100-million-plus police training complex, was thwarted by a Democratic mayor and city council. In his time as mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel—fresh from the Obama White House—tried to break the Chicago Teachers Union. When that failed, he closed 50 schools, leaving long-term pain in his wake. And need I repeat the whole sordid Eric Adams saga?

Perhaps we’re not as disunited as we think: In red and blue states alike, we can all relate to seeing the popular will trampled by careerist elected officials, whether at the municipal, state, or federal level. The disunion is coming from inside the house.

Sarah Jaffe is the author of From the Ashes, Work Won’t Love You Back, and Necessary Trouble.

Tangled in Tradition

Kate Christensen

These days, political differences often come down to how you feel about destroying nature for the sake of profit. The gamut runs from can’t-hurt-a-bug bleeding hearts to kill-for-fun, drill-baby-drill psychopaths. Most of us fall somewhere in between. We have to live, after all.

When it comes to conservation, our nation is increasingly divided between two opposing views: the belief that the web of life is sacred and interconnected and must be protected for the good of us all, and the belief that unchecked, unregulated growth is a red-blooded American birthright and that anyone who threatens it is an impediment to progress.

Here in Maine, no enterprise is more symbolic than the lobster industry. The lobsterman is our cultural icon: the hardworking man who chugs out in a boat at dawn and pulls a rugged sustenance from the sea. And there is no more iconic representation of New England’s economic and maritime history than the North Atlantic right whale. Hunted to near-extinction in the 19th century, they rebounded in the 20th century during a period of rising conservationism. But since the deregulations of the Reagan era, when environmental protection became politicized, the pendulum has swung hard right, even in the face of looming catastrophe. Today, right whales are once again gravely endangered—as of last count, there are fewer than 370 of them left.

Entanglement in fishing gear and strikes from ships, often lobster-fishing vessels, are the primary threats to the whales. In the Gulf of Maine, the whales’ migratory path takes them through a thicket of 400,000 lobster-fishing lines, vertical buoy lines that run from the surface down to traps on the ocean floor. When whales become entangled, they critically injure themselves or starve to death. Because of rising ocean temperatures, the lobster population in the Gulf of Maine has exploded in recent years as it’s plummeted in southern New England. But scientists are projecting an imminent decline in the gulf as well due to the lobsters’ ongoing northward migration, since the Gulf of Maine is the fastest-warming body of water on Earth.

In the face of their own looming obsolescence, and despite the damage their gear does to these endangered whales, the lobstermen have been doubling down. Instead of pivoting as an industry to oyster or kelp farming, they’re fighting for their right to keep catching lobsters the same old way. Lobster harvests in the Gulf of Maine reached an all-time high in 2021 but have been declining ever since. In 2022, a major ocean conservancy group put Maine lobsters on its do-not-eat “red list” to call attention to the plight of the whales, prompting the lobstermen to sue for defamation. Industry spokespeople claim that ropeless fishing, which uses acoustic modems and remote-deployed trap recovery methods, would cost a prohibitive $375,000 for a lobsterman fishing a full allocation of traps in eight-trap trawls. There is no practical solution at present beyond the lobstermen voluntarily suspending fishing during whale migration.

Meanwhile, whales keep dying from getting entangled in lobster-fishing lines, and the industry evidently intends to keep pulling lobsters out of the Gulf of Maine until they’re all gone. This is the only way of life the lobstermen know. Their identities are inextricably connected to it.

This is human nature, the American way. The tension between conservation and exploitation has always been tricky to balance. In the struggle between lobstermen and the right whale, there are no winners. And as Maine goes, so goes the nation.

Kate Christensen is the author of two memoirs and 11 novels, most recently Good Company, forthcoming in the summer of 2026.

Democracy on Trial

Madison Smartt Bell

For me, as for many, the ultimate question is whether the United States will become an autocracy or remain a nation of laws. In the latter case, the object of the game is to discover and enact what citizens actually want; to that end, laws are created by the national legislature, implemented by the executive, and tested by the courts by reference to the US Constitution, a document that has been revised from time to time, usually for the better. The risk now is that, for the first time in our history, it may be disregarded—or even jettisoned altogether. That would make the United States one of the most dangerous autocracies in the world, alongside Russia and China.

Since 2016, most legislators on the right have cravenly capitulated to executive overreach. Preemptive compliance happens in the futile hope that caving in advance of absolute compulsion may protect a group from being noticed or harmed.

The despotic intention of the executive no longer bothers to mask itself. If the legislature continues to do nothing to oppose it, the next recourse is the courts. So far, the judiciary has mostly held up, likely because anyone who has made a career in the legal profession believes very firmly in the rule of law. There may be exceptions, including a couple on the Supreme Court—although at the time of this writing, it seems the majority of the highest court does follow the rule of law.

The next test will be whether the executive will simply flout court orders, a thing some have already declared it will do, and which is already beginning to happen.

After that, the test will be whether the midterm elections in 2026 will actually be free and fair—which may not happen without struggle.

The next test will be whether the military, which has supported the rule of law up to now, can be corrupted from the top down, something which has certainly happened elsewhere. That possibility takes us to a very dark place. As a Southerner, I have an atavistic memory of what it’s like to lose a civil war, and the conditions for another one have been present for a long time. We have the most heavily armed civilian population on the planet, and for now, the arms are mostly in the hands of the right wing.

The Calvert family founded what became the state of Maryland on a principle of tolerance—religious tolerance at first, because the Calverts were closet Catholics in an age of compulsory Anglicanism. But tolerance of other kinds of difference expanded to become part of both the state and the national culture, including the political culture—though not without being aggressively challenged, time and again. In this area we have lately been failing, as much on the left as on the right. The left has been wrong in dismissing its opponents as ignorant, backward, deplorable.

To practice real tolerance, one must try to understand the motives of those who think and act differently, which in turn requires the difficult operation of entering into the point of view of the other. One of the appeals of autocracy is that it allows such difficulties to be evaded, because difference can simply be stamped out or driven underground.

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of numerous books, most recently The Witch of Matongé.

Our Oldest Rift

George Scialabba

Massachusetts and South Carolina have a troubled history. Before the Civil War, Massachusetts was probably the most vociferously anti-slavery state, and South Carolina probably the most ardently pro-slavery. John C. Calhoun, slavery’s most implacable and articulate defender, was a South Carolinian; the best-known abolitionist journal, William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, was published in Boston. Massachusetts insisted on tariffs to protect its manufacturers; South Carolina bitterly resented the effect of those tariffs on its agricultural exports.

On May 20, 1856, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner delivered a scorching anti-slavery speech that contained particularly harsh criticism of South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler. Two days later, Butler’s younger cousin, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, approached the elderly Sumner in the chamber and beat him senseless with a cane. Sumner was severely injured and was absent from the Senate for three years, but Brooks’s action was popular in South Carolina: Hundreds of people sent him canes to replace the one he had broken in his assault on Sumner.

When the war came, Massachusetts Governor John Andrew agitated for an African American regiment. President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton were reluctant, but Andrew persisted. Finally, the regiment was formed; to train and lead it, Andrew tapped 25-year-old Robert Gould Shaw, the son of a notable Massachusetts abolitionist. At first, the regiment was kept out of combat and confined to support services. It was eventually allowed to spearhead the assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. The regiment took heavy casualties, and one of the first was Shaw. It was customary on both sides to return the bodies of officers to their families for burial. The Confederates made an exception for Shaw, whom they despised for leading Black troops. He was thrown with his soldiers into a mass grave. His abolitionist father called that the highest honor he could have wished for his son.

Today, Massachusetts and South Carolina are as far apart as ever. This time there is no prospect of either armed conflict or secession­—the plutocracy will not allow it. An independent North and Pacific West would likely evolve into a social democracy, as the whole country might well have done if not for the South’s stubborn resistance to civic equality, organized labor, and the welfare state. The plutocracy is wholly dedicated to preventing any evolution toward social democracy, or even a return to New Deal liberalism.

What could begin to undermine this deep-rooted sectional mistrust? Short of winning back control of all three branches of government, which may take a while, perhaps a little cultural exchange would help. What if every Massachusetts high school student had to spend a year in South Carolina, and vice versa? It undoubtedly wouldn’t turn a whole generation of South Carolina’s youth into wild-eyed radicals or Massachusetts’s youth into pigheaded reactionaries. But they might be slower to reach for that cane.

George Scialabba’s most recent book is Only a Voice: Essays.

How Water Divides Us

Anna Clark

In times of groundlessness, I come back to the water. In Michigan, it can’t be helped.

My native state is split across two peninsulas stitched together by a five-mile-long suspension bridge and bordered by four of the largest lakes in the world. I’m the type that boasts to oceanside friends of the majesty of the Great Lakes: their frigid depths; their thousands of miles of shoreline; their store of nearly all the fresh water in the United States. Poured over the lower 48 states, it would settle at a depth of more than nine feet. Even well beyond this inland coast, Michigan’s abundance of lakes, streams, and rivers means you’re never more than six miles from a natural body of water.

So goes my Middle West patriotism. It’s a common sort, across all corners of this swingiest of states. But water is revelatory. It forces us to be honest. And the truth is, our water is a weapon as much as it is our shared wealth.

It wasn’t long before The Nation’s founding that the river between Detroit and Ontario—a final crossing on the Underground Railroad—divided people between enslavement and freedom. “Thanks be to Heaven that I have got here at last,” wrote one who got free. “On yonder side of Detroit river, I was recognized as property; but on this side I am on free soil.”

Nearly 200 years later, the water still wrenches us apart. I grew up at the outlet of the St. Joseph River into Lake Michigan. All my life, and long before, that river has been a shorthand for the divide between two very different towns: St. Joseph (largely white, well-off) and Benton Harbor (largely Black, poor). For many, the river was itself a source of fear—and crossing it was out of the question. I may have grown up working-class, but living in St. Joe privileged me with vastly different prospects than those of a kid in a similar family just a mile or so north. This country was built on the violent foundation of “separate but equal,” and here, in towns I love, is one more place where it is perpetuated still.

Then, too, Michigan is home to the Flint water crisis. It began in 2014, when the choices made by those who held power over a poor city of nearly 100,000 people turned their drinking water toxic, especially with lead and deadly Legionella bacteria.

In 2016, when I was working on a book about the water crisis, a poet in Flint opened her home to me. The city was still reckoning with the fallout. The poet’s ringing question haunts me: “Can water be made holy again?”

I find my words meandering like the ghost streams of Detroit, buried long ago under the city streets. But this is the point: Michigan’s waters demonstrate the cause and effect of our choices in an uncomfortably literal way. Our past flows into our present. We must meet it to meet each other. There is no other way.

Anna Clark is a Detroit-based investigative journalist with ProPublica. She teaches creative nonfiction at Alma College in its MFA program.

Learn From the Land

David Treuer

My homelands, my Ojibwe tribal homelands, are an intimate place, somewhat devoid of grandeur, but to me and my kin indescribably beautiful. These homelands are studded with lakes. Some, like Lake Superior, Lake Mille Lacs, Leech Lake, and Red Lake, are so vast they can’t be seen across. Others, mere dips in the land, are so small they have no name at all. But all remind me of Joseph Conrad’s description of the ocean, which “seemed to pretend there was nothing the matter with the world.”

But, of course, there was. And here in the western Great Lakes region, there is: the series of treaties we, the Dakota, and other tribes signed with the US government between 1805 and 1867, which resulted in the state of Minnesota imposing its sovereignty like a poorly folded blanket over the corpse of our great Native Nations—the most premature of burials.

It began even before statehood in 1858 but accelerated with European settlement. Swamps and bogs were filled in to make way for plowed fields. Forests were cut down. Over the past 150 years, Minnesota has lost roughly half of its wetlands and half its forests. Prairies have fared even worse: Some 19 million acres have been reduced to around 58,000. Bison and elk went extinct east of the Mississippi. All that remains of the original forests are 144 acres of old-growth red and white pine just north of my reservation, known as the “Lost Forty.”

But despite those losses, our Nations did not die out. We survived and grew. We have remained alive, profoundly so, enough to curb the appetites and shape the behavior of our younger civic brother, the state of Minnesota. We have welcomed our new Somali and Hmong relatives. We shape our governments and keep them true to their ideals.

In 2023, the Minnesota Legislature passed—and Governor Tim Walz signed—new laws guaranteeing 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, free public and college tuition for lower-­income Minnesotans, a new child tax credit, free lunches for all public school students, driver’s licenses for all residents regardless of immigration status, stronger unionization, the restoration of voting rights for convicted felons, protections for abortion rights, and a “trans refuge” law that protects transgender children traveling to Minnesota to receive gender-affirming care from states that would punish them. Legislation also passed that set 2040 as the goal for Minnesota’s electricity to be carbon-free.

Back in the treaty days, our leaders would often refer to themselves as children and to the United States or the president as the “Great White Father.” This was a rhetorical strategy used to placate an insecure but powerful opponent. The truth is now clear: Our civilizations are older, we’ve been here longer, we have been the “father,” and Minnesota, all the other states, and the Union itself are our children.

At least compared with its neighbors—Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota, where the seeds of liberalism have largely died back or never took root—Minnesota remains committed to all three words in the official name of its dominant political party: “Democratic,” “Farmer,” and “Labor.” The state is perhaps not unlike the Lost Forty: grown up, somewhat alone, but ready to reseed the political land around it with something that will actually grow.

David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. His latest book is The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present.

Freedom Fight, Redux

Makani Themba

In the late 1990s, a group of anti-poverty activists in Idaho told me that one of their most compelling arguments was to tell legislators that their state was in danger of becoming Mississippi.

Nobody wanted that.

Mississippi tends to hover at or near the bottom of every quality-of-life ranking. The state continues to embrace its particularly brutal history of chattel slavery and Jim Crow rule. For liberals, Mississippi presents a troubling exception to the story of a kind and fair America, the same story that makes it difficult to comprehend Trumpism. This is not “supposed” to happen in America, only in places like Mississippi—the backward, anachronistic outlier that no state wants to become. However, as with any stereotype, the real story is more complicated. The truth is that Mississippi has always been the state where this country’s deepest divisions are continually contested.

During Reconstruction, Mississippi was a bellwether of a different kind. Its 1868 constitution was progressive for its time, including voting rights provisions for Black men, the abolition of slavery, and property rights for married women. However, once Southern Democrats recaptured power (helped in large measure by the federal government), a new constitution was ratified in 1890 that reversed most of the advances of 1868 and established the state’s Jim Crow framework.

Of course, the mostly Black Mississippians who were the architects of Mississippi’s Reconstruction did not go down without a fight. The protracted struggle for the soul of this state has forged some of the nation’s most tenacious and brilliant freedom fighters. By the 1960s, organizers were able to focus global attention on their struggle: Songs were written about it, and people came from all over the world to stand with them in solidarity. It was this human rights movement that made Mississippi a pox on America’s “free country” image and forced the federal government to intervene.

Sixty years later, there will be no feds to the rescue. The state is a pariah no longer. In a recent stump speech, Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann claimed that he’d had a conversation with Elon Musk that may have inspired DOGE:

So, he [Musk] said, “You’re telling me that you’ve cut the number of people that actually work for the government?” I said, “You ought to try that. I think that would go over pretty big in Washington. You can tell President Trump, our President Trump, he can use this.” He [Musk] said, “Well, that’s kind of a miracle.” And I said, “Yes, sir. It’s a Mississippi miracle.”

The “Mississippi Miracle” has been nothing short of devastating. Billions of dollars in Medicaid expansion funding, as well as funds to address food insecurity for children, have been refused. In March, the governor signed a law that will eliminate the state income tax by 2037.

Mississippi was once a poster child for the politics of the past. Now the state is a harbinger of our potentially dystopian future. But there’s still that “other” Mississippi, fighting for a state—and a world—where we all are free. Don’t count us out just yet.

Makani Themba is a writer and organizer based in Jackson, Mississippi.

Dying Inside

Sarah Kendzior

Missouri invented the American Dream. Hannibal’s Mark Twain wrote the Great American Novel; Marceline inspired Walt Disney to conceive his animated adventures; in St. Louis, Chuck Berry created rock and roll. Missouri showed America the hamburger and the hot dog and the ice cream cone at the 1904 World’s Fair, held when St. Louis was the fourth-largest city in the United States. Missouri is not North or South, not East or West. It is simply American.

Missouri destroyed the American Dream. Born from a bad bargain—Missouri was admitted as a slave state in 1821, balanced out by free Maine—it was promptly plunged into violence. In the east, enslaved Black people crossed the Mississippi River to escape white mobs. In the south, Native Americans died walking the Trail of Tears. In the west, Mormons were massacred. In the north, Missouri militias battled Iowa in the so-called Honey War. And that was just the 1830s.

In 1857, the Supreme Court declared Dred Scott, a man enslaved in Missouri, as well as all Black Americans, ineligible for US citizenship. The case helped precipitate the Civil War, in which Missouri declared itself “neutral,” which is Missourian for everyone getting targeted, just like “compromise” is Missourian for everyone getting screwed.

After the war, southern Missouri was overrun by a vigilante gang called the Bald Knobbers. The state became an outlaw hideout, with rich racists like Jesse James lurking in caves. Today’s rich racists lurk in the statehouse.

Missouri excels at turning violence into entertainment. The state that birthed Twain’s tall tales became the stronghold of Cape Girardeau’s Rush Limbaugh. As for the Bald Knobbers, they got an amusement-park attraction in Branson. Because why not? Missouri is the capital of “why not.” Drive the huckster ruins of Route 66 and see for yourself.

In the 21st century, Missouri has become a petri dish for the end of the American experiment. Missouri used to be the bellwether, picking the winner of the presidential election for a century. That changed in 2008, when the winning candidate was Black and dark money turned the middle ground into quicksand.

Missouri is the Show-Me State: Residents demand proof before respecting authority. We never get proof, so no authority is respected. The entire spectrum of political protest runs through Missouri, which birthed both the Tea Party and the 2014 Ferguson uprising. Even its geography is a microcosm of the nation: big cities at the borders, small towns in between, farmland in the north, swampland in the south. Coast dwellers could learn a lot from Missouri—if they ever noticed that it existed.

Missouri is the most beautiful place on earth. Our rocks are ancient and our streams are clear and our people have been abandoned. Missouri is the broken heartland and our rivers are the arteries, spreading glory and poison nationwide. We are the bellwether of decline, but I’m not leaving. In Missouri, you see America from all sides.

Sarah Kendzior is the author of The Last American Road Trip. She lives in Missouri.

From Purple to Red

Gabriel Furshong

“I’m heartsick,” Marc Racicot told me after he returned from a 560-mile trip to address town hall meetings held by Indivisible in Bozeman and Billings. “Heartsick that we’ve come to this point in the country. And, of course, we could see it coming, which makes it more difficult.”

This confession leads to an important question for those who wish to remedy American disunion: How long should we have seen it coming?

A former Montana attorney general (1989–93) and governor (1993–2001), Racicot was a “close friend” and powerful surrogate for George W. Bush after the contested 2000 election. His reassuring voice, an echo of Bing Crosby’s, informed C-SPAN viewers that there was something “terribly wrong” with the manual recounts in Democratic-leaning Florida counties. A talented prosecutor, Racicot became chairman of the Republican National Committee and helmed Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.

Given this record of partisan service, Racicot’s consistent and creative opposition to Trump was newsworthy. It was also ineffective. The Montana GOP formally rebuked Racicot in 2023, and Trump supporters now occupy every statewide office in this once-purple state.

In late March, I visited Racicot at his new home in an upscale Helena subdivision. At 77, he believes the country has declined since he ran the RNC. He cites the hollowing-out of the economy, the unlimited campaign spending, the hyper-partisanship, and the Internet’s amplification of untruth. But when I asked whether Trump is the cause of our disunion or a consequence of the divisive forces that came before him, Racicot denied a connection between the party he directed and the one he’s rejected.

“Trump is not a product of anything other than his own genetic composition,” he argued. Yet the truth is far more grave. Our current state of disunion cannot be cured by a single election; it is a symptom of chronic disease. And like most Never Trumpers, Racicot shares responsibility for advancing this affliction.

He knows that 2,000 Palm Beach County votes were misdirected from Al Gore to Pat Buchanan 25 years ago, tipping the election to his friend. He knows the Bush tax cuts ballooned federal deficits to enrich the wealthiest 1 percent. He also knows the United States killed at least 433,000 people in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he backed President Bush, who said, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”—a clarion call for those who abhor dissent, eschew evidence, and reject international law. Certainly, then, he understands the politics of avarice and exceptionalism that made Trump possible.

“I’m not hysterical,” Racicot concluded, “but I worry about violence, and if it starts, I don’t know where it stops.” Montana, now a deep-red state with rapidly growing income inequality, is a place where such violence might commence—or, rather, compound. If we wish for a different future, then we must admit that our problem isn’t one person or one party. We must acknowledge that our problems emerge from a past that most politicians would prefer to forget.

Gabriel Furshong is a freelance journalist based in Helena, Montana. His stories and essays can be read in The Nation, High Country News, Montana Quarterly, and other magazines.

Nuance Under Siege

Joseph “Jazari” Kual Zakaria

The nonpartisan spirit that once set Nebraska apart appears to be fading, swallowed by the ooze of hyper-partisanship that is now seeping through the marble halls of our nation’s only unicameral legislature. What was once a chamber of neighborly debate now echoes with the talking points of national operatives. State senators find themselves under pressure from beyond our borders—urged to rewrite our electoral process, not for Nebraska’s sake but to tip the scales in favor of one man’s return to the White House.

Since 1992, Nebraska has split its Electoral College votes, a quirk it shares with only one other state (Maine). Each of our three districts awards a single electoral vote independently, while two others go to the winner of the state’s popular vote. Adopting this system was a quiet act of defiance and nuance in a nation addicted to binaries, an acknowledgment that no state is truly monolithic.

Now national political figures want to erase that complexity, forcing uniformity where there’s diversity. GOP leaders have expressed frustration over the Second District’s Electoral College vote being awarded to Kamala Harris. Yet the target isn’t just a single swing-district vote—it’s the idea that contradiction can coexist with democracy.

Between the wide skies of the rural west and the faster-moving cities of Lincoln and Omaha (at the center of the contested Second District), it’s not just geography that separates Nebraskans but access to healthcare, broadband, civic power, and educational opportunity. The divide isn’t new, but it is deepening.

Education once served as a unifier. We took pride in our public schools, local control, and university system—a shared story that crossed county lines. Now education has become another battleground. Rural schools are consolidating or closing because of population loss and budget cuts. In urban classrooms, the curriculum has become a flash point, as debates over what we’re allowed to teach—and who gets to decide—play out as proxy wars in national ideological battles.

There was a time when we believed in teaching the full story of our nation’s past, from its darkest sins to its brightest ideals. We trusted that honesty was a form of honor. Today, some seek to shield young scholars from entire chapters of the American journey, as if ignorance could substitute for pride. Students are left to inherit these divisions before they can even understand them.

Nebraska matters—and not just because the Second District’s whims could potentially determine the president. We mirror the country’s deeper crisis: How can we remain one nation when we no longer share the same lived reality?

As a young lawyer, long before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln warned that if destruction ever came to America, it wouldn’t come from a foreign army; it would come from within. The fraying we see in Nebraska isn’t just regional tension—it’s a warning. If we can’t find ways to honor difference and protect nuance, then the disunion we fear may already be here.

Joseph “Jazari” Kual Zakaria is a journalist and the host of The Jazari Kual Show. Based in Lincoln, Nebraska, he covers politics, culture, and community issues from the Midwest to the global stage.

The Mirage

Nicholas Russell

There’s an eerie silence squatting in the rural valleys of Nevada, a dead, smothered pause mistaken for peace.

In 1922, Anne Martin, a Nevada suffragist who was the first woman to run for the US Senate, wrote in these pages, “She [Nevada] is the despair not only of reformers but of case-hardened lawyers, who must be agile indeed to keep pace with the rapid and contradictory changes in laws made every two years by servile legislatures, at the command of the selfish interests which elected them.” You can’t make sense of Nevada’s place in the Union, Martin suggests, without acknowledging the contradiction always lurking in the background in this country.

Throughout its history, something more compelling than morals has had to rule in Nevada: a desperate hope to escape America’s crushing machine, which churns on more ruthlessly now than ever.

Larger in area than all but six other states, with over 85 percent of its land owned by the federal government, rich in minerals, growing quickly in population, legally permissive on certain issues, politically and socially conservative on others, drying out fast along with its Southwestern neighbors, Nevada fits easily into a vision of American wiliness—the desire for money, power, and influence—and the all-American impulse to be left alone. It’s the distillation of the frontier West, settled by Americans looking for space, chance, and choice—though what is meant by “settled” and who is meant by “Americans” remains unstable. The drive was and continues to be the possession of wealth and abundance, the dream that there is room enough for everyone, that enterprising ambition can make water spring from rock.

Patrick Blanchfield recently wrote in n+1 that “the only thing holding our empire together is the collective fantasy that somebody, anybody is dynamic, cogent, and, above all, in charge enough to lead and make sense of the machine.” There are bodies caught in the gears and beneath the wheels of this apparatus: those disappeared by law enforcement agencies deporting critical or inconvenient voices, those destroyed by American weapons gifted to genocidal regimes, and those dispatched domestically by faraway drones like those piloted remotely at Creech Air Force Base, just outside Las Vegas.

Once again, America is donning settler boots, firm in a zealous belief in its own omnipotence, its would-be masculine psyche, its immense power. In the sense that the country is a geopolitical entity, it is whole and cohesive. But its rugged posture—an adjective marshaled liberally throughout the Western states—belies an assumption of hard-earned isolation. It’s a philosophy of the frontier that by striking out into the desert, one endeavors to find nothing, no one else, a vacancy waiting to be claimed, raw material to be shaped, with blighted strangers to be driven out. Start walking toward the infinite horizon and you may begin to feel deluded into thinking you’re in a land apart from everything else, where there are no enemies or allies, only a world that is wild and must be made to yield.

Nicholas Russell is a writer and critic from Las Vegas. His debut novel, Observer, is forthcoming from Ecco.

In Nothing We Trust

Matt Hongoltz-Hetling

New Hampshire clings to Mount Monadnock, the mountain in its southwestern corner that juts defiantly skyward, a lone rocky resister to the forces of erosion that wore everything else away.

Rugged, individualistic, idealistic, the “Live Free or Die” state was a cradle of the American Revolution and has long been the grave of administrative ambition, featuring neither seat-belt laws for adults nor a general sales tax. It has a vibrant secessionist movement and the highest rate of machine-gun ownership in the nation.

Individualism reigns—or so we are told—even as large swaths of the southern part of the state have been turned into charmless concrete strip malls. In Somersworth, a small cemetery is bombarded all day and night by the distorted voices emanating from a loudspeaker at a KFC/Taco Bell franchise, which casts a ghastly purple pall over the graves.

Sure, there are nods, of a sort, to the past. Along the Seacoast, there have historically been few lobstermen (accounting for less than a third of a 10th of a percent of the economy) and roughly zero pirates, but tourists are bombarded with lobster-­festooned paraphernalia and fake pirates carrying fake parrots and shouting “Ahoy, matey!” over and over. “Nostalgia without history is a decorative fraud,” wrote the poet Donald Hall, who died in 2018 at the age of 89 in his Wilmot farmhouse.

Until recently, New Hampshire burned with visions of a strange and wonderful future. The dreams were varied, often collective, and frequently whimsical, as when Keene held a 2013 pumpkin festival that set a world record for the most lit jack-o’-lanterns (30,581). Or when the millionaire businessman Roger Babson, the author of the essay “Gravity—Our Enemy Number One,” gave Keene State College a stone monument to encourage resistance to this immutable law of nature. (Babson’s Gravity Research Foundation, founded in New Hampshire in 1949, persists to this day.)

But sometime around 2010 or so, New Hampshire saw a large influx of libertarians who purported to adhere to a pure Thoreauvian individualism but who behaved more like a gang of whiny crypto-geeks. Mischief abounded; misinformation flourished. Already ranked dead last in per capita support for higher education, the state cut spending in half. In the ensuing belt-tightening melee, the University of New Hampshire, the state’s premiere public education institution, accepted a $500,000 grant offered on the condition that its football team would have to run tackling drills with no helmets on.

The Granite State (which, incidentally, is actually made up mostly of schist and gneiss) is now a national leader in distrust of government, distrust of media, distrust of church, and distrust of neighbors. The glue that bonded communities together has been washed away in an acrid tide of individual rights and crappy commercialization.

The year after Keene set the jack-o’-lantern record, attendees at the annual festival began smashing pumpkins, then windows. They flipped cars, set fires on the street, and attacked cops. “USA!” they chanted. “USA!” Full of dreams of wilderness, and wildness, and violence, New Hampshire has already put one foot firmly back in the cave.

Award-winning journalist Matt Hongoltz-Hetling’s third book, The Ghost Lab, is about a group of oddball paranormal enthusiasts in New Hampshire.

What Exit?

Nell Painter

These disunited United States? Here in my securely blue state of New Jersey, surrounded by states—or parts of states, in the case of Pennsylvania—also securely blue, my first thought is: “No disunity here!” My second thought is that New Jersey is so diverse, with the largest proportion of foreign-born residents except for California, that such a varied populace surely means disunion. But, no, demographic diversity does not disunite New Jerseyans. What does it is geography.

A little over a decade ago, Rutgers graduate Joe Steinfeld labeled a map of my state, with plain-speaking cruelty, from north to south as follows: “Well-to-Do Conservatives”; “The Melting Pot” (where I live); “Poor Minorities”; “Russians, Polacks, and Toxic Fumes”; “Jews”; “Lawyers Driving Hybrids”; “Old People and Asians”; “Italian Guys in Wife Beaters”; “Pretty Much Alabama”; “Sad Black People and Misguided Tourists”; “Swamps and Toxic Waste”; “Canadians and Philly Trash.”

What holds all this together, what unites the varied people of New Jersey, is this: roads. Asking a fellow New Jerseyan “What exit?” is a test, and the answer proves one’s Garden State bona fides.

Public transportation also brings us together, especially in North Jersey. (South Jersey, sadly, isn’t so well-served.) I’m thinking of NJ Transit’s network of trains, light rail, and buses. Years ago, when I was commuting from Newark to New Brunswick for art school, I made a collage in homage to Newark Penn Station, from which you can take trains and buses pretty much everywhere.

But public transportation has also exacerbated tensions between New Jersey and its metropolitan neighbor. The congestion pricing program that went into effect in New York City earlier this year charges automobiles $9 to enter Midtown Manhattan. The money raised will go toward improving public transportation in New York City, not in New Jersey. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, a staunch Democrat, has begged President Trump to halt the program, which Trump has made clear he intends to do. The debate has deepened the divide between those who use public transportation and those who drive cars. That divide, of course, is bigger than just New Jersey: It’s fundamental to the health of the global environment.

Nell Painter’s most recent book, I Just Keep Talking, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2024.

We’re All in the Same Boat

Judy Chicago

We’re All in the Same Boat is part of a series I did between 1994 and 2000 titled Resolutions; A Stitch in Time. It was done in collaboration with some of the best needleworkers with whom I’ve worked over the course of my career as I had become interested in pushing the boundaries between painting and the needle arts that I began in The Dinner Party (1974–79), my monumental tribute to women’s contributions to Western Civilization, now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum. It was during that project that I discovered that—even though I can neither stitch nor sew—I have an unaccountable ability to design for needlework. Since then, I have designed a myriad of needle and textile techniques and worked with hundreds of stitchers, many of whom collaborated with me on numerous projects. I invited the best of them to work with me again on a project about values, something that seemed important to address as we approached the millennium and has only become more critical today as we see an ever-increasing breakdown in some of the primary values of our culture, as embodied in the present administration and its chaotic policies.

I consulted experts on proverbs like Wolfgang Mieder and discovered that most believe that when proverbs and adage are no longer passed down from one generation to another, it connotation a breakdown in values, something that—as I mentioned—seemed to be happening. As a result, I decided to invite some of my longtime needlework collaborators to “think” about shared social values with me and to select some that seemed crucial to social cohesion, and also would lend themselves to visual form and challenge their skills. We began to meet at my studio in New Mexico and everyone brought multiple suggestions from which we selected a number that fit into seven basic themes; Family, Responsibility, Conservation, Tolerance, Human Rights, Hope and Change, categories that we all agreed were basic to a developed society.

One of the interesting complications of this project involved proverbs that seemed to defy illustration because the images would seem ludicrous, for instance, “Cut off your nose to spite your face.” Hence, the selection of adages that lent themselves to visual form proved to be the first job. Next came grouping them into the appropriate categories. For example, We’re All in the Same Boat seemed to fit easily into the section on Responsibility. It is an image of a diversity of responses to being in a sinking ship, a metaphor for the many problems facing our world. The piece combines a variety of needlework techniques (executed by three needleworkers, each with a different set of skills) with my painting; appliqué, embroidery, and smocking, which involves compressing a piece of fabric so that it creates a folded, textured surface which was then embroidered by another stitcher. Like all the pieces in Resolutions, it is modest in size and humorous because taking on a subject as significant as human values could lend itself to pretentious images; thus, modesty of scale and lighter tone seemed essential.

Judy Chicago is an artist, writer, teacher, feminist, and humanist.

Time to Go

D.D. Guttenplan

  The rumor of a great city goes out beyond its borders, to all the latitudes of
  the known earth. —Vincent McHugh, “The Metropolis and Her Children”

To the citizen of the metropolis, New York State is an abomination and an imposition, a mere collection of geographical facts—capital: Albany; population: 19.9 million; highest peak: Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks; notable attraction: Niagara Falls. Somehow, through various flukes of history (not least the fact that during most of the Revolutionary War, New York City was occupied by the British), the state’s vast hinterland came to politically dominate the more populous, prosperous urban south.

At times, it was almost possible to view this subordination as a partnership. Under Governor DeWitt Clinton, a former New York City mayor and a failed presidential candidate, the state built the Erie Canal, a 19th-century nautical superhighway that made New York Harbor the new nation’s preeminent port. A century later, during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s two terms as governor, the rampant corruption of Mayor Jimmy Walker’s administration created an opening for the Fusion candidate Fiorello La Guardia, whose personal honesty and independence from the Democratic Party’s Tammany machine made him particularly useful to the newly elected President Roosevelt, allowing FDR to channel federal relief funds to the city without fear of their being diverted into politicians’ pockets. From the Lincoln Tunnel and the Triborough Bridge to parks, schools, libraries, swimming pools, and a plethora of arts and theater projects, the result was a thriving social democracy in one city. In 1937, for instance, the Works Progress Administration provided nearly a third of New York City’s budget. FDR’s successor as governor, Herbert Lehman, did as he was told.

In the decades since the New Deal, however, the upstate tail has too often wagged the urban dog. From Hugh “Society” Carey, a Democrat who seized upon the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis to eviscerate social services, forcing an end to a century of free tuition at City College and closing hospitals, cutting school budgets and raising subway fares to satisfy the bankers, to Andrew Cuomo, who vetoed Bill de Blasio’s proposal to fund the city’s new universal prekindergarten and after-school programs with a tax on millionaires, Albany’s potentates have resisted acting in the city’s best interests—and been far too eager to throw their weight around. The possibility that one particular bully—Cuomo, currently leading in the polls for mayor—may shortly become the bullied, adds a layer of irony but does nothing to alter the essential calculus.

Which is compelling. New York City’s 8.5 million inhabitants would put it in the top 13 states by population—well ahead of Massachusetts, Maryland, and Missouri. If Albany weren’t bleeding us of billions in city income and property taxes—and stiffing us on school funding—the city’s long-term budget deficit would be a surplus. New York could, once again, become a genuine laboratory for democracy.

The current Democratic mayoral primary has seen a number of ambitious ideas offered by progressive candidates. But none of them are likely to be implemented while the dead hand of Albany holds the tiller.

The self-governing city-state is an idea as old as Athens—and as new, and prosperous, as Singapore. The visionary 1969 campaign of Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin was built around independence for the city—an idea whose time has surely come again.

Enemies: A Love Story

John Jeremiah Sullivan

People say North Carolina is one of the swingiest of swing states. Having lived here for 21 years, I see the truth in it. Republican Legislature, Democratic governor—that’s both the persistent reality and a serviceable metaphor. You often find yourself chockablock with your enemies. For us lefties, that means the most atavistic Dixie stereotypes, newly pumped on Trump juice, featuring both the wealthy-racist-snob and hostile-worm-farmer varietals. For those on the right, millions of whom are no doubt poring over this text with open minds, there are the liberals of the Research Triangle, plus small but entrenched bohemian communities everywhere you look (especially in the mountains). Socially speaking, there’s no avoiding each other. When we North Carolinians are at our best, we occasionally get along and establish weird pockets of middle ground. But we haven’t been at our best in a loooong time. And now everything’s darkening so fast.

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a younger friend, J.P., who lives in the county adjacent to mine, in a town that has always been a literal and figurative backwater but is now reportedly one of the fastest-growing places in America. Every time I drive out there, new housing developments and the attendant outdoor malls have reconfigured the landscape to the extent that I get physically lost.

We were talking about his neighbors, a middle-aged couple, hard-core Trumpers, flags in the yard. (In town, only a handful of outliers—bona fide aspiring brownshirts—advertise it like that, and they tend to be given a wide berth even by other Republicans. But these folks were country, out and proud.) And the thing was, J.P. said, shaking his head, they were really nice. “Like, shirts off their backs,” he said. They’d been his neighbors for a couple of years, and you know how it is: Things happen, whether you want to get to know somebody or not. Your dog gets loose, and they help to catch it. You get sick, and they stop by with food. Before you’ve had a chance to strap on your armor, your humanity has intermingled with theirs, and now you can’t unknow it.

Neither of us felt sure about what these nice neighbors are, as political animals. Are they still fellow sons and daughters of the republic? Or something else, something new? In the past, Americans have often sought to find out how far they could push their preferred value system while remaining democratic Americans. But these people follow a man who has made it clear that he will simply go as far as he can. Historians remind us that this kind of right-wing radicalism has always been with us, but now it sets the tone. And so the prevailing mood down here, among people I know, seems to be one of anxious questioning: How far will they go? Will they ever come back? And if they won’t come back, what’s left, and what the hell do we do?

John Jeremiah Sullivan lives in Wilmington, North Carolina. His essay “Corona” appears in this year’s edition of The Best American Essays.

The Empty Bookshelf

Taylor Brorby

North Dakota has often been a testing ground for the country’s worst practices and ideas, from the radioactive river water caused by oil and chemical spills to the creation of a reservation system for controlling Native peoples.

This should make it ground zero for writers—if only we could produce them.

At cocktail parties, I’ll often ask well-read guests to name a North Dakota writer—just one, any one. An awkward silence will sweep the room as ice rattles against glass, or someone swirls their red wine before taking a swig.

North Dakota? Who even thinks about North Dakota?

And it’s true: For most of my life, even close out-of-state friends can’t remember where I’m from, saying “South Dakota”—or, worse, lumping the region into some vanilla-flavored mass and, hedging their bets, saying that I’m from the Dakotas.

There should be no shortage of writing prompts in a state where Sitting Bull was forced to surrender his rifle, where we blow up the Badlands to drill for more oil. We even have a lake that doesn’t freeze in the winter—and anyone who has experienced a North Dakota winter (or seen Fargo) should immediately understand how alarming that is—because its water is used to cool the coal-fired turbine engines of a power plant.

Like our topsoil, writers from North Dakota eventually get blown into other states: Louise Erdrich to Minnesota; Chuck Klosterman to Portland, Oregon; Louis L’Amour to Los Angeles. As with the extractive industries that define the state, exporting our writers is an act of self-sabotage: It allows other people to shape our stories, to sculpt the cultural narrative of North Dakota.

North Dakota is also sandwiched between two much more literary states. Minnesota produced a Nobel Prize winner, Sinclair Lewis, as well as the author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, while Montana gave us A River Runs Through It and The Power of the Dog. North Dakota gave us Mr. Bubble and the wood chipper in Fargo.

From our arsenal of nuclear warheads in the north to the clear-cutting along the Red River Valley in the east, whether we are strip-mining for coal in the south or fracking for oil in the west, North Dakota is defined—and hemmed in—by various forms of violence. It is nearly impossible to escape the crushing reality of the state: that it appears to be hell-bent on self-destruction.

Maybe—maybe—if North Dakota finally found a way to invest in its artists, perhaps then it could finally shift the narrative it tells of itself about the glory of plundering the prairie. It’s the only narrative available, given the absence of writers willing to tell a different one, but it’s time for North Dakota to share in the pressing task of revising the myths we’ve been telling ourselves about our great country.n


Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land; Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience; and Crude: Poems. He teaches at the University of Alabama.

A People’s Peerage

Michael Clune

The United States has, in this millennium, vindicated the predictions of Marx and Tocqueville that under capitalist conditions, the ideal of equality inevitably decays into the pseudo-egalitarianism of the marketplace and culture is leveled down to the lowest common denominator. The equality of all persons irresistibly morphs into the equality of all consumer preferences, and gone is the idea that there’s anything higher to aspire to than our money-­grubbing days and TikTok-scrolling nights.

To address this problem, I propose a political and social intervention, modest in scale, that might provide a gentle corrective to market egalitarianism. It will, at the very least, encourage us to elevate our gaze above the sordidness of our present moment. In short, I believe the time has come to create, by act of Congress, a hereditary nobility in the United States.

Under this act, each state will name one duke, four earls, and six barons. These titles shall take the names of Americans notable for their literary, scientific, military, or artistic achievements—Frederick Douglass, H.P. Lovecraft, and so forth. The initial families ascending into the nobility will be chosen by lottery, and the title will then be inherited by the eldest living relative. The annual income, guaranteed by the federal government and funded by a tax on billionaires, will vary depending on the rank between $5 million and $300 million.

This solves a few problems. For one, those who have previously sought to counter the dominance of commercial values in our society have often been suspected of acting from mere resentment. Some have parlayed their disdain for naked commerce into extorting money from the working classes. For example, the professional-managerial class that has become the base of the current Democratic Party has given progressivism a bad name from their low habits and grasping attitudes. The alternative to unfettered capitalism modeled by these progressives is the economy of a fussy, bureaucratic dystopia ruled by so-called experts whose primary motivation is to differentiate themselves from the working class on whose behalf they claim to speak.

Social hierarchy, on the other hand, is a time-tested means of disseminating nobler values. The American nobility, like censers placed atop pillars, will diffuse the incense of anti-commercialism throughout the Union. These nobles will be prohibited by law from engaging in any business activity whatsoever and will also be barred from social media. All members of the nobility, when traveling abroad or within the United States, will be entitled to protection by a special new branch of the Secret Service, the Nobles’ Guard. In this way, we will furnish our great nation with concrete examples of a prestigious form of life securely set apart from our degraded commercial culture.

Michael Clune’s books include the novel Pan (forthcoming in summer 2025) and the memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. He lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

The Myth of Unity

J.C. Hallman

Oklahoma embodies American disunion as well as any state. It’s a geographically peculiar place, not traditionally associated with any of the country’s regions—certainly not the Northeast or Pacific Northwest, and ill-fitted to the West, the Midwest, and the South as well.

It’s also a small state, at 4 million people, with two significant metropolises, Tulsa and Oklahoma City. The former is a Southern city, the latter a Western city—a drive of less than two hours separates them.

The far southeast of the state is known as Little Dixie and butts up against the Ozark Mountains; the opposite end, a distinctive strip of land that no one particularly wanted, is about as close to the Wild West as you’re going to find in the 21st century. They call it the Panhandle, but that’s in Florida; Oklahoma looks more like a butcher knife.

You know Oklahoma from the pop-culture signposts—Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—and based on literary metrics, the state was transformed from bountiful frontier to ecological apocalypse in the span of a decade.

American disunion may begin there.

But it’s older than that. A decade before the wind ripped down the plains, Oklahoma was torn asunder by one of the worst race massacres the country has ever known—wrongly called a “riot” for many years, and to be honest, not even “massacre” gets it right: It was a small, lopsided war, featuring the first use of aircraft to launch offensive attacks in the United States.

Before the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Black Wall Street in the city’s Greenwood District was a shining emblem of hope. Was it an expression of union? Perhaps not, but it offered evidence that the toxic history of slavery might one day be transcended.

I live in Tulsa; I live in Greenwood; I live in a building once owned by the newspaper that printed the story that triggered the violence.

To be honest, even fixing the start of American disunion at the Tulsa Race Massacre overlooks the equally horrific massacres and equally fundamental fissures that formed when the Alabama Creeks were force-marched along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma.

Perhaps a better question than “What now divides the United States?” is whether it was ever united in the first place.

It’s chic to say that America is split down the middle on basic facts. Oklahoma may have that covered, too.

Donald Trump began referring to Oklahoma-born Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has claimed some Cherokee ancestry, as “Pocahontas” in 2016.

One year later, Kevin Stitt, in announcing his candidacy for governor of Oklahoma—an office he still holds—made his first public assertion that he was a card-carrying member of the Cherokee Nation.

Graham Lee Brewer, an assiduous Cherokee journalist, fact-checked the claim: Stitt’s line traced back to a figure whose Indigenous status had been vigorously challenged by the Cherokee Nation a century ago.

Stitt is a “pretendian.”

Which suggests a final answer we may be loath to confront: Rather than losing our country after 250 years, perhaps we have only been pretending to have one.

J.C. Hallman is the author of seven books, most recently Say Anarcha. He lives in Tulsa.

Homage to Portlandia

Shay Mirk

Shay Mirk is a comics journalist, teacher, and zine-maker. They are the publisher of the nonfiction comics press Crucial Comix and are on Instagram as @mirkdrop.

Star Bolts

Brian “Box” Brown

Brian “Box” Brown is a New York Times best-selling cartoonist from Philadelphia.

Not News

Tina Cane

Tina Cane’s books include Body of Work, Year of the Murder Hornet, and Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante. Cane is the founder/director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI, and served as poet laureate of Rhode Island from 2016 to 2024.

Going Under

Albert Scardino

The low-lying coast of South Carolina—all 187 miles of it, the home to 1.4 million people—may be a sandcastle on the beach facing an incoming tide.

Satellite imagery shows that the ocean is rising faster and the ground is sinking more rapidly there than almost anywhere else between Canada and Mexico, a combined change of roughly one inch a year that may be accelerating.

Nancy Mace, the member of Congress who represents the region, is determined to keep balls out of the women’s stalls on Capitol Hill, as she put it during her campaign against transgender people earlier this year. Mace’s district had been competitive before 2020; then the Legislature packed much of Charleston into an adjacent Democratic district, giving her a 14-point partisan advantage.

Representative Buddy Carter, from neighboring coastal Georgia, is pushing a bill to rename Greenland “Red, White and Blueland.” Carter’s district is sinking, too. His state’s Legislature, also dominated by Republicans, did him a similar favor.

The Atlantic coastal crescent here is a movable line. At different moments in recent geological times, it has existed 30 miles farther out or 30 miles farther inland, always a string of sand beaches and dunes never more than 30 feet above the sea. When ocean levels dropped during ice ages, the offshore sandbars grew into barrier islands. When seas rose, the old barrier islands farther inland became new ones again.

The Gulf Stream flows north much farther out along the shallow continental shelf here than it does off Florida or North Carolina, creating a reverse eddy in the shallow pool up against the coast. This eddy carries sand south from one island beach to the next for almost 300 miles, from Cape Hatteras to St. Augustine. There isn’t any rock on the surface to hold the sand, only a layer of porous limestone buried under 30 feet of old ocean sediment and another 30 feet of clay.

That layer of porous limestone carries another stream of water, drained from the foothills of the Appalachians. By the time this freshwater arrives 60 feet beneath the coastline, the flow behind it is pushing it through clay and sand to form artesian ponds and freshwater swamps.

These swamps, broad salt marshes, strong tides, and deep estuaries created a pristine wilderness. With abandoned rice and sea-island cotton plantations, the sparsely settled South Carolina–Georgia coast is about the same size on a map as the Grand Canyon, but its deepest points are rarely more than 30 feet below the water in the sounds along the coast, the highest 30 feet on the top of sand dunes above the beaches.

Then came the paper industry. Then the bridges. Then the golf courses. Now the tourists—more than 40 million of them each year. So much water is being pumped from the limestone that the pressure that used to support the sand above it has dropped. The ground is sinking.

In 1893, a hurricane drove up along the coast from Florida. The front edge of the storm pushed against the southward-­flowing coastal currents, creating a 16-foot swell ahead of it. More than 2,000 people drowned. The seas inundated much of Hilton Head, the largest of South Carolina’s islands. The population of Hilton Head in 1950 was just 300; today, it is 40,000. But in August—the month of the 1893 storm—there may be more than 125,000 visitors who have come for the hard-packed beaches and 26 championship golf courses. The island is accessible by one road over the Intracoastal Waterway.

Albert Scardino comments in various media on public issues in the United States and Europe. He lives in Bluffton, South Carolina.

Life on Stolen Land

Rebecca Clarren

As a teenager, my great-grandmother Ruth Sinykin rode bareback across the South Dakota prairie. Each day, a new adventure: hail the size of baseballs, prairie fires, rattlesnakes. Once, a surprise blizzard, and she was lost for hours, surviving by drafting off the cows’ heat.

These anecdotes traffic in pluck and grit, like every story I heard about my homesteading ancestors when I was growing up. Veracity was less important than the overarching theme that we had survived, even thrived, on the stark, dust-blown plains.

Here is what I know as fact: In the late 19th century, my family was living in Russia, where as Jews they weren’t allowed to own land. Ruth’s father had been beaten and nearly killed in a pogrom. Fleeing for their lives, they came to South Dakota, where the United States was awarding 160-acre plots for free under the Homestead Act; ultimately, the government would grant nearly 100,000 such parcels to settlers in South Dakota. To keep the land, they had to “prove up,” which meant building a house and plowing the sod. By the 1950s, Ruth and her family owned 5,500 acres.

Land ownership, Ruth told her daughters, made her feel free, like a real American. My family, like many other South Dakotans, mortgaged their acreage to start businesses, to chase opportunity, to better their children’s odds.

What I didn’t know growing up was that our homestead was available only because America broke a treaty that had reserved huge swaths of western South Dakota for the Lakota. By the time my family planted their first crop in 1908, the Lakota had been relegated to an estimated 2 percent of the land they were promised less than 60 years earlier; during that period, the United States had encouraged soldiers and settlers to slaughter millions of buffalo, the animal on which traditional Lakota life depended. While my ancestors proved up, the United States, in an effort to further eradicate Indigenous people’s connection to the land, took Lakota children away from their communities, converted them to Christianity, attempted to erase their culture. While my family was speaking Yiddish and praying with the Torah, America made it illegal for Native Americans to speak their languages, practice their rituals, and pass their religion down to new generations. This land dispossession and attempted cultural genocide have left a deep legacy: Four of the poorest counties in America contain Lakota reservations.

Those of us who descend from homesteaders—an estimated 25 percent of American adults—benefit from the intergenerational wealth that we accrued through mortgaging, leasing, and selling our free land. One legal scholar calls the Homestead Act “a huge form of affirmative action for white people.”

The foundation of America was never equality, never freedom for all. But by acknowledging our government’s theft of Native land, we free ourselves of pernicious myths and acknowledge the responsibility to repair past harms. Despite America’s best efforts, the Lakota Nation survives. When I drive over the land where Ruth once rode horses, I tune in to the local radio station and hear the Lakota language. And the buffalo, partly as a result of the efforts of Lakota people, are recovering. When I look out the window, I see the animals’ dark, hulking bodies bent to the prairie.

Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than 25 years.

Stains That Stay

Rachel Louise Martin

Hydrogen peroxide is my mama’s secret for getting out old blood. Douse the spot liberally, she says, then leave it alone. The chemical bubbles along, picking up the plasma and platelets. Cool water will wash it all away. Here in Tennessee, though, not all bloodstains are to be removed.

When I was a child, I envied a friend who lived in a house with bloodstained floors. She told me how, during the Civil War, her ancestors had graciously allowed the Confederate medical corps to use the building as a field hospital. As surgeons hacked off limbs, the blood pooled on the wooden planks. Since the boards were finished with only a skim of linseed oil or beeswax, the fluids soaked into the grain.

Hers was one of the many homes with similar stories. White families guarded the darkened spots, coating them with polyurethane or sheathing them under plexiglass. Skeptics say these blemishes aren’t blood, just age and poor cleaning habits. Never let a homeowner hear that. They will show reports from researchers in Virginia who used similar stains to reconstruct the DNA profiles of the men who bled there. Yes, in Tennessee some blood remains indelible, even when the person who shed it—their body and their story and their name—is long buried. But what if the bloodstains aren’t from soldiers? What if they are the record of the enslaved women who once cleaned the rooms?

Blood saturates our ground. It was the last testament of those who died along the Trail of Tears. It pooled below the feet of lynched bodies. Droplets fell from the brows of civil rights activists. And in the past few years, it has coagulated on the grounds of the Covenant School and Antioch High School in Nashville. All that blood we’ve tried to blot up.

Blood marks our history. Across Tennessee, activists and government agencies attempt to purge the evidence of it from the books in our schools and libraries. Their relentless efforts may sanitize what our children learn, but they cannot expunge the truth of the pain and harm inflicted in the past.

A limestone karst runs beneath much of the state. Every drop that falls on the ground above washes down through the honeycombed rock and into the streams below, becoming the groundwater we drink. Until we are willing to tackle our history honestly, it lives on in us. Only repentance, reparations, and restoration can change that. But first we must learn to say “inequality” and “injustice,” here in Tennessee and here in the South and here in America.

Rachel Louise Martin is a historian and the author of A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation, winner of the inaugural Tennessee Book Award in Nonfiction.

Lab for Bad Laws

Gus Bova

Twenty-two years ago, in the thick of the W. Bush years, Molly Ivins warned in these pages: “The whole damn country is about to be turned into Texas (a singularly horrible fate).”

At the same time, Ivins defended her home state: its enigmatic vastness and dizzying diversity, its strangeness and beauty. “It is the place least likely to become a replica of everyplace else,” she wrote.

Eighty years earlier, another Nation contributor took a crack at defining Texas. George Clifton Edwards, a Socialist attorney from Dallas, heaped scorn on the state’s anti-intellectualism, its violent disposition, and the hotbed of KKK activity that was his hometown.

Then, like Ivins, Edwards defended his native state. But he inverted the case. “There are few better places to go,” he wrote, because Texas is America writ small. “After all, is it not really just the big Southwestern specimen of American capitalism?”

I was not born in Texas (such disclaimers remain important here). I’ve lived here for one decade, in liberal Austin, so I don’t pretend to represent all 30 million Texans. But what I see here is something like a malign synthesis of the Ivins and Edwards arguments.

Texas remains a “National Laboratory for Bad Government,” as Ivins put it, spreading reactionary policies to other states. In 2021, for instance, Texas invented bounty-style anti-abortion laws that weaponize civil litigation against pregnant people. The next year, our governor shifted the whole nation’s politics rightward by busing asylum seekers at random to Democratic cities.

Yet simultaneously, national right-wing politics are draining Texas of some of its stubborn uniqueness. Earlier this year, our state Legislature finally passed a private-school voucher law, after 30 years of rural Republicans’ refusing to back such a spendthrift program that wouldn’t benefit their districts. Texas did not lead the school vouchers charge but followed on the heels of other red states.

A majority non-white state expected to become a majority Latino state, Texas also used to resist extreme anti-immigrant politics. In 2001, we were the first state to pass a law ensuring that undocumented college students were eligible to pay in-state tuition rates. We avoided for years measures like Arizona’s 2010 “Show Me Your Papers” law. And Governor Rick Perry famously found his presidential ambitions stymied partly because he was not anti-immigrant enough. But Trump’s influence began to break this dam in 2017 with the passage of a “sanctuary cities” ban, followed by an unprecedented militarization of the border and the passage of Constitution-testing anti-immigrant legislation in 2023. Time will tell how many more legislative sessions the in-state tuition law can survive.

With a recent rightward shift in the Latino electorate, the project of turning Texas blue has no clear timeline for success, so the GOP will likely have many years left to demolish any remaining decency on our lawbooks.

It is true that America is in a period of sharp disunion, but what I see emerging is an unholy sort of unity: As America becomes Texas, Texas becomes America, to the detriment of each.

Gus Bova is the editor in chief of the Texas Observer.

Beehive for Sale

Katharine S. Walter

A pair of three-foot-tall bronze beehives engraved with “Industry,” the state’s motto, sit on the steps of the Utah State Capitol, gifts from Kennecott Utah Copper, which operates the world’s largest open-pit mine. The honeybee is the state insect of Utah, and its hives—symbols of industry and unity—appear on everything from highway signs and the state flag to the iconography of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The effect of such an unwavering commitment to industry is visible from the Capitol steps: A massive chunk of the Oquirrh Mountains has been ripped away for the Kennecott mine, and Kennecott’s chimney—the tallest man-made structure west of the Mississippi River—puffs out plumes of toxic air from the copper-­smelting process.

The great gift of living in Utah is that 68 percent of its land belongs to the federal government—more than in any other state except Nevada. Among these publicly owned landscapes are river-sculpted canyons of Navajo sandstone and vibrant stands of quaking aspen, as well as the fragile habitats of the desert tortoise and the California condor. Much of it spans the sacred ancestral homelands of Native communities.

Inside the Capitol building, however, legislators have long wished to unlock the vast stores of carbon underground and the real estate potential aboveground. (More than one-third of them personally profit from real estate.) Last summer, under Governor Spencer Cox, the state of Utah filed a lawsuit seeking to wrench 18.5 million acres from the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the largest holder of public land in Utah. A bizarre and expensive ad campaign—paid for by Utah taxpayers—featured billboards with photos of a smiling climber and the slogan “Let Utah Manage Utah Land.” The Ute Indian Tribe called the plan “an existential threat.”

Though the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit earlier this year, the feds are no longer an obstacle. Promising to “unleash” American energy, US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has removed requirements for environmental-impact statements for oil and gas leases on BLM lands in Utah and six other Western states, and he has also rescinded the popular Public Lands Rule, which requires conservation to be considered alongside extraction.

Utah’s campuses, once seen as unifying, are now sites of division as well. Last year, the University of Utah shuttered a number of student centers, including the Black Cultural Center and the LGBT Resource Center. New laws prohibit some students from using bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and teachers from hanging pride flags. The University of Utah found $6 million to pay McKinsey & Company to find “efficiencies” just months before the state’s higher education budget was slashed.

Honeybees are colonists, brought to Utah on some of the earliest pioneer wagon trains, and often outcompete native bee species. Many of the state’s ridgelines and rivers have been tarnished irreparably by almost 200 years of industry and colonization. Yet from the Capitol steps, you can also see the glory and grandeur of what has been fought for and is still here, at least for now—to the east, the snowcapped Wasatch Mountains, and to the northwest, a stripe of light reflecting off the Great Salt Lake.

Katharine S. Walter is an epidemiologist based in Salt Lake City.

Rural Peril

Sue Halpern

On March 3, around 100 residents of my small mountain town crammed into the community house for a town meeting, Vermont’s annual exercise in participatory democracy. After a convivial potluck, a volunteer moderator steered the discussion of the action items posted in the town report that we’d all dutifully brought with us. Did we, for example, want to spend $6,000 on the upkeep of our four local cemeteries? Did we agree that property taxes will be due on November 1? Did we agree to allocate $44,950 to our fire department? It was a fairly routine meeting, with little debate and the “ayes” dominating, until we came to Article 5 on the agenda: “Would the town vote the sum of $25,000 to establish a capital fund for long-term or larger infrastructure projects that townspeople or others could contribute to?”

Why, suddenly, our town—as well as more than two dozen other Vermont municipalities—was asking its residents, who already pay some of the highest taxes in the country, to establish an additional fundraising vehicle to which we, or other generous souls, could contribute, tells you all you need to know about the future of rural communities in Trump’s America. Two years ago, we suffered a flood so severe that a number of roads and bridges washed away, the power was out for days, and a house was carried off its foundation and crushed in a landslide. We were able to recover, thanks to help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but there was another flood the following year, and no one thinks it will be the last. This is where the capricious whims of Donald Trump, who apparently sees FEMA as an extension of the welfare state, will imperil my town and state and others like them. As the chair of our select board told us that night, repairs from the 2023 flood cost around $1.5 million. Add to that the other federal moneys that are distributed through the states for such things as roadwork and energy resilience, and it came to around $3 million. If Trump gets rid of FEMA and cuts off other federal programs, as he has promised to do, we will be in trouble. “If you thought it was a big deal your taxes went up last year by 14 percent,” the chair said, “without these grants, every household would have to pay an additional $15,000.” It was still winter, our snowiest in a long time, and she joked—sort of—that the town may have to resort to giving everyone a shovel and a box of salt and telling them to clear the roads themselves.

Vermont has reliably voted for Democrats—and Bernie Sanders—for decades. This past election was different. True, the congressional incumbents won, but the Democrats in the state Legislature lost their supermajority—in fact, the party gave up more seats here than in any other state. And now our somewhat moderate Republican governor, emboldened by this and, perhaps, by the machinations in Washington, is pushing to eliminate universal school lunches, to reorganize the school system in ways that will destroy local control, and to rescind climate change mandates.

At our town meeting, Article 5 was finally put to a vote. After an amendment to its wording and an acknowledgment that $25,000 wouldn’t cover the cost of even a single culvert, it passed. The social fabric can tear only so much before it is in tatters.

Sue Halpern is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College. Her latest novel, What We Leave Behind, will be published in June.

Crater of Democracy

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Here in Virginia, the founders always surround us. Thomas Jefferson’s home looms over the University of Virginia, where I work. My office sits on land that once was James Monroe’s plantation, where enslaved people toiled to build his wealth. James Madison’s estate is a short drive away, and George Washington’s plantation remains one of the state’s top tourist destinations. More than Massachusetts, where the Revolutionary War began, Virginia, where the war ended and the Constitution began on Madison’s desk, can rightly claim to have started the whole story of continental conquest and the slow march toward democracy.

A United States as a global power ruled by a would-be tyrant with criminal convictions and no moral foundation would be unrecognizable to these founders. For all their flaws, they were steeped in the ethic of civic republicanism, a commitment to the greater good through deliberation across differences.

Modern Virginia would also be unrecognizable to the founders. It’s diverse, dynamic, cosmopolitan, and global. The military-­industrial complex rules the southeastern corner of the state. A limping coal industry survives in the southwest. The northeast is peppered with wealthy white suburbs and striving immigrant enclaves. Richmond grows as a medium-size capital city with a vibrant Black middle class. And rural central Virginia, where I live, is the place where all these cultures and economies cross and converge at the flagship university of this growing and increasingly Democratic state.

That was the story I used to tell, before August 11, 2017, when my hometown was invaded by fascists and white supremacists emboldened by the election (via the fluke of the founders’ faulty constitutional design) of one of their own as president. They injured dozens of my neighbors and killed one as police stood by and watched. Ever since, Virginians have known that our democracy is fragile. When, almost 41 months later, another horde of fascists stormed the US Capitol, we were not surprised. The 2017 Unite the Right rally had proved to be a dress rehearsal.

Now my students fear the worst for themselves and their families. Many are immigrants and wonder if their visas or even naturalized citizenship status are in danger. Others, children of immigrants, wonder if their birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the very Civil War that was fought all over Virginia and that ended with the liberation and eventual enfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of Black Virginians, is in danger as well. Mostly, they fear for their futures. Many of their parents have been forced out of federal jobs, while those they hoped to fill themselves after graduation are no more. Elon Musk and his nerdy storm troopers have dismissed and denigrated a selfless federal workforce, the economic foundation of Virginia.

The founders had no idea the country they created would turn out so rich, so powerful, and yet so morally weak and economically fragile. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence now seems hollow. Madison’s Constitution is ignored. The US economy is cratering from northern Virginia outward. As in the Revolution, the Civil War, and now at the possible fall of American democracy, everything ends in Virginia.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.

Tear Down Every Wall

Rick Steves

Walls are a big part of our world. like any good tour guide, I’ve embraced the wisdom of the “dual narrative approach” when introducing travelers to such barriers. To really understand a wall, you need to talk with people on both sides of that wall—whether Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land or Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. But what about in our own country?

In America, we’re grappling with a mighty, if metaphorical, wall dividing our nation—one that we’ve painted blue and red. And as we search for a solution to the culture war raging around us, the challenge will be to talk to people on both sides of that wall and to employ the same dual narrative approach here at home.

Living in a blue state like Washington, I’m working hard to take this challenge seriously. At a recent Hands Off! rally in my hometown, rather than wear a blue shirt (signifying Democrat), I wore purple and wove the beauty and practical necessity of understanding both blue and red into my message.

The most powerful experiences I’ve had on the road are when I’ve ventured into divided lands and crossed walls to better understand the viewpoints on both sides. And that’s the broadened perspective every American can gain by venturing metaphorically from red to blue or blue to red within our own country.

Traveling across a wall, whether it’s between Tel Aviv and Ramallah or San Francisco and Abilene, can inspire a sense of foreboding, even fright. But we need to be bold. Fear is for people who don’t get out much. The flip side of fear is understanding, and we gain understanding when we venture outside our comfort zones.

I often think about the imperative to “Love thy neighbor.” If you believe in a God, then it logically follows that we’re all children of that heavenly creator. That means we’re all brothers and sisters. And travelers understand that “Love thy neighbor,” which is a basic tenet of every monotheistic religion, has nothing to do with proximity. Suffering, need, joy, and hope—they are just as real across the sea as they are across the street.

I’m not afraid of our world. I celebrate it in all its diversity. And when I return home, I pack a treasured souvenir: an appreciation that the world is filled with love, joy, hope, and good people. Sure, it’s complicated, and there are serious problems out there. But the big takeaway is that we’re all in this together. (And we all enjoy our gelato.)

This philosophy applies to travels within the United States, too. Perhaps all Americans—including myself, a true-blue Washingtonian—would benefit by getting out a bit more and exploring our own country. Maybe start by going purple… crossing the street… and tearing down that invisible wall.

Rick Steves is a public television host, best-selling author, and outspoken activist.

We Were the Future

Ann Pancake

West Virginia is generally considered behind the times, stuck in the past. But in truth, we were the future. We’re the harbinger and vanguard, the dress rehearsal and training ground.

Our government was designed from its inception to serve capitalism. The oft-repeated narrative about West Virginia being created to protest slavery and the Confederacy is only partly true. A handful of Wheeling industrialists and merchants—one might say an oligarchy—wrested us out of Virginia in the 1860s to serve their own interests, and few states have suffered the scale of resource exploitation that followed. The violent and still-ongoing extraction of coal, oil, gas, and lumber. The profits vacuumed out to benefit other states. The century of poverty left behind. The ripped and leveled earth, the poisoned water.

We’re also ahead of the curve on one-party rule. In 2025, our House of Delegates has 91 Republicans and nine Democrats; in the Senate, it’s 32 and two. The Board of Governors, appointed by our former Republican governor, dismantled liberal arts at our flagship public university two years before the second Trump administration targeted higher education. Our state criminalized protesting against pipelines back in 2020. Fossil fuel magnates have used race and ethnicity to divide us for a century.

West Virginia is a demonstration of how economic inequality breeds support for authoritarianism, how degraded education makes people susceptible to demagogues.

We’re also an exemplar of what we might call absentee complicity. West Virginia feeds Americans’ endless appetites for fuel, electricity, chemicals, lumber, recreation. We serve up our own land for people who live where they don’t have to see the fallout—breathe it, drink it, grieve it, run from it. If you grew up on the East Coast in a house with electricity, you can probably trace the wires back to an Appalachian coal mine.

But you also have to understand this: Because government never prioritized people here, we have had practice in working around government to help each other. We’ve been doing mutual aid long before that was even a term. Unions are in our DNA. You can find alternative economies here, and not all things are monetized. We know how to grow and forage and hunt for food. We know how to fix things, build things, and make do. We help our neighbors and care for the vulnerable; we value hospitality and courtesy. We’re a state where I can live as a gay woman in an ultra-red rural county and not be afraid.

When I look around my community, I don’t think: “How could they have voted for Trump?” Instead, I think: “How could so many have stayed this decent after all they’ve been through?” We have practice not just in surviving tyranny, but in holding on to our humanity as we try to.

West Virginians are often written about; we’ve been caricatured, belittled, scapegoated. But understand that we have our own scholars, our own artists, our own journalists, our own organizers and activists. You should have believed us when we told you that Hillbilly Elegy was a fraud.

In West Virginia, we were the future, a long-repressed warning. But understand we also know a few things about how to endure—and perhaps even overcome—this awful present.

Ann Pancake is a fiction and nonfiction writer who has published three books about West Virginia. A seventh-generation West Virginian, she lives in Preston County.

The Wisconsin Statue of Gerrymandering

Paul Noth

Paul Noth is the winner of the 2025 Thurber Prize for American Humor. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker.

After Equality

Nina McConigley

Growing up in Wyoming, you learn that the state has two nicknames: the Cowboy State and the Equality State. But now equality is one of the words that the Trump administration has ordered to be struck from government websites and materials. Wyoming was one of the first states to give women the right to vote, the first with women bailiffs, jurors, and even a woman governor. We are not that state anymore. Wyoming has one of the largest gender wage gaps in the country, low representation of women in state government, and low family-planning and college ­graduation rates.

Instead of equality, the state leans into cowboys. Everywhere you go in Wyoming, there’s a silhouette of Steamboat, the bucking horse with a rider on top. The University of Wyoming’s mascot is the Cowboy. When you’re a kid, you are constantly told to “cowboy up.” The so-called Code of the West, or Cowboy Code of Ethics, drills into young people the supposed frontier ideals of honesty, integrity, loyalty, and respect. Yet to cowboy up means not to reach out for help. Wyoming has the third-highest suicide rate in the country. State lawmakers recently voted against creating a trust fund for the suicide-prevention hotline. Wyoming ranks last in access to mental-health care, and the Legislature blocked bills to fund behavioral-health programs in schools.

Wyoming is one of the most intensely MAGA-aligned states. In 2024, Trump won with nearly 72 percent of the state’s vote, the most in the country. Wyoming is as red as the rocks in Hole-in-the-Wall, the famous old outlaw hideout in the center of the state.

Some in Wyoming do go against the grain. The 28 percent of voters who did not pull the lever for Trump largely reside in small blue outposts like Laramie and Jackson. This minority works to protect federal lands and national parks.

Wyoming is also the state of former representative Liz Cheney, one of the few Republican leaders who stood up to Trump and defended the Constitution after January 6. The state GOP used to embrace a live-and-let-live philosophy. My own mother was the first person born in India to be elected to a state legislature in the United States—and she was elected as a Republican in Wyoming, without a single other South Asian person in her district. But those days are long gone: Now the Freedom Caucus controls a majority of seats in the state Legislature.

Young people are leaving, the energy industry is faltering, federal jobs are being cut, and the state needs to diversify its economy and its populace. We are still defined by the extraction of coal and the ideology of “Drill, baby, drill!” Every summer sees more intense wildfires, the skies turning smoky and orange. Yet we are also home to the Tetons and Yellowstone, beautiful wild spaces that must be protected.

In Wyoming, one can stand on the prairie and see the horizon—but the horizon is shrinking; that distant view is being obscured. To see farther, we must become the Equality State again and commit ourselves to protecting not only our resources, but all the inhabitants of this land.

Nina McConigley is the author of Cowboys and East Indians and the forthcoming novel How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder.