Small-Town USA

“The American dream was Every man gets his castle ,” Todd Gannon, the head of architecture at Ohio State University's Knowlton School, told me. Above all else, the suburban life is one of independence, a self-contained homestead where the American family can realize its desire and potential, unperturbed by others. Even the family car gets its own b... See more

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

Suburbs are about the leisurely conquest of space, an alternative to the uncomfortable density of the city. They seem to run free from history itself, offering a sense that nothing was there before. But the illusion of tranquility frays at the edges: the neurosis required to maintain so neatly manicured a lawn, the pristine sidewalks that nobody wa

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Social media, mainstream news, and an explosion of Substack newsletters often painted pictures of cities quelled and hibernating, in some ways diminished, and of urbanites either turned inward toward self-betterment, or outward, toward their local communities or country homes.