Midwest

A Brutal Place Playing at Paradise

The filmmaker James Benning invites us to look closely at American landscapes and peer into their history. 

August 31, 2022

What Can I Give My Cashier Friend at Christmas?

At this pandemic holiday season, the checkout lady at Schnucks has become my most important relationship outside family. But behind our masks, I have no idea how to celebrate that.

December 23, 2021

A Return to Perry, Utah

When, growing up, I would say I remembered something from the West, like finding a railroad spike on the side of a mountain, my parents would say, “You don’t remember that, you remember the film.” Dad liked to project his 8mm films on a pull-down screen in our apartment.

May 31, 2019

In the Land of No News

Lincoln, Lawrence, and Norman are among America’s most attractive cities, where the opportunity for social advancement provided by big state universities are sources of local pride. Like most of the big college towns in the middle of the country, they have the art shops, the bookstores, and the cafés that coastal people say they miss in American life. What they do not have is presence. If you watch the national news on television, you see two kinds of American places: the kind where things are happening, and the kind where things have already happened. CNN and Fox speculate about the present in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles (and during campaign season, in “battleground” or swing states like Iowa and Ohio). Everywhere else in the country, things do happen, but always without warning—and rarely with anyone to witness them.

October 27, 2011

In Tea-Party Country

The notion that the federal government ought to be starved of resources is not patriotism: it is right-wing anarchism, which corrodes not only the American state but the American nation. America is defined by its middle classes, and these are ceasing to exist. Belonging to the middle classes means that, without enormous wealth, you do not need to be concerned about the security of your pension, the quality of your children’s education, and the reliability of your family’s health care. At this point few people in Clinton County, Ohio can say (despite some good public schools) that they are worried about none of these.

August 17, 2011