On the Front Porch with Tony Pipa and Brent Orrell: A conversation with Elizabeth Currid-Halkett about ‘The Overlooked Americans’

Pipa and Orrell will be “on the front porch” with Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, whose recent book “The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country,” reveals that rural America is more successful than outsiders often presume. Drawing on deep research, including data and in-depth interviews, she traces how small towns are doing as well as—or better than—cities on many measures, including homeownership, income, and employment. She also shows how rural and urban Americans share core values—even on hot button issues such as racism and environmental sustainability—revealing that the nation is less fractured by geography than we might believe.

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How Wolves Change Rivers

Let's be the change we want to see. What small changes can we ignite this week to be more open, more kind, and more collaborative? Whatever our role is, large or small, we play a part in the trophic cascade happening all around us. Small changes can generate impacts far beyond the initial effort.

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Exploring the Super Neighborhood program in Houston

I have been exploring the Super Neighborhood program in Houston to learn more granular information about the Department of Neighborhoods. They host this Neighborhood Toolbox page that is literally - Super helpful to access municipal resources and culture.

Have you met ALICE?

Across the U.S., the ALICE Essentials Index has increased at a higher rate than the CPI for more than fifteen years. From 2007 to 2023, the average annual rate of increase for the ALICE Essentials Index was 3.3%, while the CPI increased by 2.5% on average. For context, the median wage for the most common occupation in the U.S., a retail salesperson, increased 2.8% annually from 2007 to 2022 (the latest data available). The sustained lag behind the actual cost of basic goods equates to a loss of more than $26,000 over the past 15 years for a retail salesperson — more than a full year’s earnings.

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Trying to Find My Way.... Phoenix

081910 Trying to Find My Way... Phoenix Arizona

So vision is not effortless. Nor is it faithful: if you ever believed that your brain gives an accurate representation of what is “out there” in the same way that a movie camera would, then David Brown’s untouched photographs should quickly disabuse you of that notion. Instead, your attentional machinery slowly crawls the scene, analyzing interesting landmarks until it detects what is useful for the next step. In the case of one of Brown’s visual moments in time, you might be in the middle of looking for the door to the shop, or where to step, or whether the traffic light is ready to let you cross. All the other details are unconsciously and nimbly filtered out. – Dr. David Eagleman