signs of life

Now that Twitter is all-but-dead and Facebook is all-but-dead (long live Facebook Marketplace, please stop trying to ship me things), this newsletter and Instagram (and Signal, WhatsApp, Messenger, iMessage, and my email accounts, all three of them) are the only ways I have left of communicating to all the cross-sections of people I want to keep in the loop. Of course I've let it lie dormant for months. But summer is turning into fall, and I'm reminded that we owe each other things, like updates on our lives and work. So here we are.

I'm a Ph.D candidate now, full-swing into research for my dissertation/book project—which I'm calling a history of northwest Arkansas's political economy of in the second half of the twentieth century. That means Walmart, Tyson, and J.B. Hunt, and the way they shaped, and were shaped by, the state. The Daily Yonder interviewed me about all of this a couple months ago if you're curious for a deeper dive. I also had the pleasure of shooting a short film about Walmart with Bart Elmore and Ethan Payne for the Southern Foodways Alliance in Bentonville last summer; you can read a conversation between the three of us at the Arkansas Times here.

I've published a couple of articles in the last week:
- The Forebears of J.D. Vance and the New Right, for the History News Network (if you don't already, you should subscribe to their excellent newsletter)
- Lives on the Line: An interview with Alice Driver, for Facing South. Alice's important book about Tyson poultry processing workers in Arkansas came out earlier this week; you should buy it here

And a couple others of interest I wrote between this newsletter and the last:
- Let Her Cook, a profile of Whole Woman's Health CEO Amy Hagstrom Miller in The Nation's April 2024 issue
- Summer in the South is Becoming Unbearable, for The Atlantic last summer

I'm also now the assistant editor at VQR, where I edit our front-of-book #VQRTrueStory column and write our newsletter, among other things. And as of earlier this summer, the Southern Exposure archive—a years-long project—has finally been digitized in its entirety! Check it out here.