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DROUGHT SEASON: New dispatch from the high plains published today at 6:05 AM INVESTIGATIONS: 14 area towns without a resident physician — a new series begins FICTION: James Olave’s “A Manual for Returning” now in full ESSAY: “On Counting” by Anneliese Pell — read in full Subscribe to the print edition — Vol. XII still available
Drought Season
photo: hero.jpg — rural landscape, plains, dusk
Reportage · Featured

Drought Season: Voices from the High Plains

Three years into the worst drought in living memory, we drove 1,400 miles through Nebraska, Kansas, and the Oklahoma Panhandle, talking to farmers, county agents, and a water lawyer who has not won a case since 2014. What we found was not despair. It was something more complicated.

By Elena Marsh  •  December 12, 2019  •  24 min read  •  14,250 readers

Recent

Essay

On Counting

A historian of rural ministry writes about the recurrence of numbers in places that do not call themselves superstitious.

By Anneliese Pell  •  Dec 11, 2019
Feature

Night Dispatch: The Last Long-Haul

Seventeen hundred miles across three states in a Kenworth T680 with a man who says he will retire when the last truck stop diner closes.

By T. Kavinsky  •  Dec 9, 2019
Reportage

Three Funerals in Platte County

In a county losing its youngest residents to the cities, what does it mean to bury someone here? Three families. Three springs. One question.

By D. Callahan  •  Dec 6, 2019
Fiction

A Manual for Returning

A man drives back to the town he left at seventeen and finds that some of the buildings have changed, and some of the people have not, and some are missing without explanation.

By James Olave  •  Dec 5, 2019
Essay

What the Corn Knows

Precision agriculture has turned the American field into a data source. The farmers who benefit least are the ones who grow the most.

By R. Fujimoto  •  Dec 3, 2019
Fiction

The Minister’s Garden

A short story about a man who grew roses every year for forty years, and the season the roses failed to come up, and what he decided to do about it.

By C. Wren  •  Nov 30, 2019