Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Americana
At the edge of a section of irrigated ground on the Great Plains, you can sometimes see the history of a decision. A center pivot that ran a full circle for thirty years now stops short and backs up. Its wheel tracks end where a new set of steel transmission poles crosses the field. Two […]
What makes the place you live different from every other place out there? It’s not the Taco John’s out on the strip. It’s not the dollar store, or the strip mall, or the Starbucks. It’s the red brick commercial buildings around the courthouse square, in so many American communities built in that common pattern. It’s […]
In 1919, Clem Kruse started selling Oldsmobile, Maxwell, and Chalmers-Velie vehicles from the ground floor of a two-story concrete building on Mill Street, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, just south of the Twin Cities. Upstairs, Kruse’s Hall hosted dances, plays, and high school basketball games. One hundred years later, Cannon River Winery opened a tasting room […]
What began as scattered neighborhood resistance to individual projects has become something much larger: a national backlash against the physical footprint of the AI economy. According to Data Center Watch, at least 75 data center projects worth more than $130 billion were delayed or canceled in the first quarter of 2026 alone, effectively matching the […]
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently reported 96.9% of Americans have access to 100/20 Mbps fixed terrestrial broadband. I guess that puts me among the 3.1%, despite a 44% reduction in unserved populations in rural America over the last two years. I was reminded of that report listening to Deb Brown and Becky McCray […]
We’ve all been there. You get home late and open the fridge to start making dinner and find somebody finished the milk and didn’t put it on the list. Or the eggs. Or something you could run down pick up at the corner grocery in the city. But you don’t live in the city. You’re […]
Somewhere in your county, there’s a parcel that’s about to become a question. The family that farmed it for three generations has kids who moved away years ago. They’ve got their own lives, their own mortgages, their own reasons for wanting to convert that ground into something they can sell. They find a developer who’s […]
Pullman, Washington, is the county seat of Whitman County. It’s not the largest or smallest place out there; it’s a Main Street community that seems to sit about right. The city of about 33,500 residents has grown over the past 25 years, as has the county, at a faster or slower rate like much of […]
Downtowns are enjoying a renaissance as the malls across suburban America shrivel up and get bulldozed by the dozens. It wasn’t so many years ago the big legacy department stores like Sears and Wards fled downtowns for the malls. Now those stores are no more—replaced in turn by Amazon and its online copycats—while the authenticity […]
Energy isn’t usually what draws people into small‑town leadership. You run for the council or join the planning commission because you care about streets and schools, housing and jobs, maybe the new playground down by the river. But sooner or later, usually at budget time, the line items for electricity, natural gas, and fuel start […]
