Richard Grant I’ll always love the American Southwest because it’s where I first encountered the desert. Arid places are my personal landscape — and this one contains more stories than most. Arizona’s defining social characteristic is transience. According to today’s guest, outsiders move there “to make a fresh start and reinvent themselves, or to find a refuge where they can be their...
Richard Grant The road is America’s preeminent symbol of freedom. Richard Grant hitchhiked, walked, and drove those roads in a series of travels he described as “memories strung out on a single cord of highway, fourteen years long and headed nowhere in particular.” He discovered “a roadside culture of wandering rootlessness.” Not a pastoral herding community, but “an aggregation of loosely knit...
I read a collection of long pieces written by Joan Didion in the 1990s called Political Fictions this week. It contained “the first of a number of pieces I eventually did about American politics,” she wrote in the Preface, “most of which had to do, I came to realize, with the ways in which the political process did not reflect but increasingly proceeded from a series of fables about American...