The Country Got Safer, and Almost Nobody Noticed
August 18, 2026 · 2 min read
Murder fell 11.6% in 2023 and 14.9% in 2024 nationally — among the fastest declines on record. For two decades, most Americans told Gallup crime was rising even in years it was…
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Ninety-Five Years of Government Violence Against Citizens. Zero Convictions.
August 18, 2026 · 3 min read
Wounded Knee, Ludlow, Tulsa, Kent State, and MOVE span nearly a century and five different targeted groups — and share one identical outcome. No government official or officer…
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The Bill Always Comes Due — Fracking Taught Oklahoma First. Climate Is Teaching Everyone Now.
August 18, 2026 · 3 min read
Oklahoma's fracking-induced earthquakes already proved the mechanism: a risk shift becomes a price, and the price lands on whoever didn't choose it. Climate change is now running…
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The porters carried the network
August 18, 2026 · 4 min read
White passengers called every Black Pullman porter "George," regardless of his real name -- a habit descended from naming an enslaved person after his owner. The same men were…
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We live near people like us
August 18, 2026 · 6 min read
One in three North Dakotans has Norwegian ancestry, the highest concentration of any group in any state. DC has the largest Ethiopian community in the US; Minnesota has the…
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The weather you were never going to have
August 18, 2026 · 3 min read
Roughly 25 million Americans live in the two states where snow, on average, does not fall at all. Seventy-one percent of the country lives outside every county that touches the…
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Seven dollars an acre — the richest county in New Mexico, and the road that runs down from it
August 16, 2026 · 9 min read
Los Alamos County has the fourth-lowest poverty rate in the US. Twenty-five miles down the mesa, Rio Arriba County's poverty rate is nearly seven times higher. The deeds say why:…
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Acceptance of people showing up
August 16, 2026 · 4 min read
Almost nobody actually gets to choose whether difference arrives -- in a family, a neighborhood, a country. It shows up on its own schedule, through a parent's remarriage, a new…
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The capital had a seat, and Congress took it back
August 15, 2026 · 4 min read
About 712,000 people live in Washington, DC — more than live in Wyoming or Vermont. They pay more federal tax per person than the residents of any state. They have no vote in…
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Nobody's county pays for itself
August 15, 2026 · 17 min read
Two counties, four hundred miles apart, both live on money earned somewhere else. In one, a third of households receive food assistance. In the other, a third of the population…
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What shared identity actually buys, and who pays for it
August 14, 2026 · 4 min read
A country of 340 million people with no shared tribe, language, or religion has to build cohesion out of an idea instead. One state didn't have to -- and its numbers on political…
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The wealth hiding in flyover country
August 14, 2026 · 3 min read
North Dakota and South Dakota are the two smallest, least-covered states in the country by nearly every measure this site tracks. They are also sitting on a sovereign wealth fund…
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