The Long Song

Review

Midwesterners literally watch the grass grow; can tell you the age of a stretch of asphalt by the hum of their tires.

The first KFC is located near Versailles, Kentucky

It’s no accident that some of our nation’s finest neurotics bought Prairie homes

The Prairie houses that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in the leafy Oak Park neighborhood of Chicago abide by a principle known as “compress and release.” The entrances and hallways of these homes are tight, cramped affairs, often with low ceilings and few windows. Wright’s goal was to compress the visitor so that, upon entering the living room, he could achieve an orgasmic release; your standard-issue field guide to psychoanalysis can tell you more (it's no accident some of our nation’s finest neurotics bought Prairie homes). Wright’s exteriors likewise played on the illusion of the prairie’s flatness. The profile of a Prairie house is almost two-dimensional, allowing it to blend into the Midwest's pencil-thin horizon. Actually step inside one of these houses, though, and you’ll discover a startling degree of depth. Oak Park is also a favorite stomping ground of Ratboys, the Chicago-based indie-rock band whose latest record, The Window (Topshelf), puts Wright’s prairie philosophy to …

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Lithium

Meet the human price of ‘environmentally friendly’ electric car batteries

We’ll put a 500-foot-deep pit in your barn

45-day supply of bottled water if your well goes dry

Corporate mining giant Piedmont Lithium Inc. fails to meet Chad Brown’s definition of a good neighbor

By Farahn Morgan

In the summer of 1991, I was five years old and living in my grandfather’s American dream. Together with my mother, we spent the warm season in China Grove, a farm town 35 miles northeast of Charlotte, North Carolina, fixing up a white one-bedroom house with a red-brick porch and a Rose of Sharon bush out front. For my grandfather, it was a homecoming. He was raised in the old white farmhouse, and when he married my grandmother — “that little hillbilly,” he’d called her, before their love blossomed — he tried for a while to make a home with her in a back building she insulated with newspaper clippings advertising farm-supply stores and White Lily flour. When The Great War was over, he came back to her and their new daughter in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. For half a century, he dreamed about the fertile North Carolina soil. He always thought he’d make it back there for good, but he never did. Besides all the Bojangles butter biscuits we ate that summer, my most vivid memories are …

The Long Song

Lithium

Metamorphosis