Heartland

Out in the rolling country just east of Columbus, Ohio, a new—and potentially brighter—American future is emerging. New factories are springing up, and, amid a severe labor shortage, companies are recruiting in the inner city and among communities of new immigrants and high schoolers to keep their plants running.  read more »

Hipsters sitting in an apartment in Silicon Valley or on the wharf in Boston can code a new restaurant-reservation app or pixelize a new video game with knockoff characters from Game of Thrones. But it takes someone who knows their way around a power tool to geofence a concrete rotary hammer or to automate a factory-floor process for making a sewer cleaner.  read more »

Quick – name a fast-food chain that has taken the nation by storm with its authentic, great-tasting fare and has spread like wildfire everywhere, even on the coasts, while staying true to its flyover country values.  read more »

There’s a myth in Indianapolis Republican circles that goes something like this: back in the good old days, the Indiana GOP was made up of high minded, moderate statesmen from metro Indianapolis like Richard Lugar and Bill Hudnut.  read more »

Here’s a followup to the post from earlier this week about my experience at a “Restoring the Urban Middle Class” conference in Houston a couple weeks ago.  read more »

A few years ago, who’d have thunk it? But Elon Musk has earned his spurs as a resident of Flyover Country. Now he seems to be more like one of us than one of them.  read more »

Few beehives of industrial activity have prospered more through the last decade than Elkhart County, Indiana. As the global capital of recreational-vehicle manufacturing, the area prospered from the RV-sales boom after the Great Recession and amid $2-a-gallon gasoline, and then the industry got another accelerant when Americans fled to the great outdoors over the last couple of years in reaction to the pandemic.  read more »

In 1946, the American author John Gunther described Houston as “mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches”. The only reasons to live in the city, he claimed, were financial; it was a place “where few people think about anything but money”.  read more »

Ford is rapidly laying down the path to the future of the automobile, but in a strange way the new journey is wrapped in its past. That makes for a striking contrast — and promise — in Ford’s revolutionary strategy as the company accelerates production of its F-150 Lightning all-electric pickup truck in Dearborn, Michigan.  read more »

No thanks to President Biden — who botched our star turn in his State of the Union address and refuses to loosen his restrictions on our hydrocarbon industry —but Flyover Country is beginning to experience a major moment.  read more »