Imagine, for a moment, a world in which a former U.S. president is nearly assassinated, a Republican vice presidential nominee is announced, and the current U.S. president and presumptive Democratic nominee drops out of an election occurring not even four months from now, all in the span of roughly one week. 

Oh, yeah! We don’t have to imagine, our reality really is this absurd. 

I am still reeling from the past week, but of course, the news cycle races on so my journalist brain is already onto the next question – what does all this mean for rural America? 

Mahbub Rashid is the Dean of the Architecture school at the University of Kansas. His recent book, Built Environment and Population Health in Small-Town America: Learning from Small Cities of Kansas, tests whether the most basic principles of urban planning really apply to small towns and rural areas. Shocker: many of them don’t.

Enjoy our conversation about what we miss when we bring an urban sensibility to rural problems.

Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.

Rural America’s recovery from the job losses of the pandemic has been a lot like the recovery from the Great Recession — slow and difficult.

Annual employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that in 2023, nonmetropolitan counties still had not quite recovered all the jobs they lost during the pandemic. Nonmetro counties were down 101,800 jobs compared to their pre-pandemic numbers, representing a 0.5% decline in employment. 

From his days serving in the military to his time working on Wall Street, Chris Kukk was fascinated by how people come together to build innovative things.

That fascination continued when the New Englander moved from western Connecticut to serve as the honors college dean at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia. There, he saw up close how folks in rural areas had plenty of creative ideas, but few places to bring those novel ideas together. 

A multi-vehicle crash in Florida involving a bus believed to be carrying “migrant workers” killed eight people and left 45 others injured on Tuesday, police said.

The Florida Highway Patrol said a school bus carrying 53 people was involved in the fatal wreck on State Road 40 in Marion County around 6:30 a.m. 

The bus was carrying migrant workers who were on route to a watermelon farm, police said, with Marion County Public Schools officials confirming that no students were involved in the crash. 

Central Appalachia is home to the third-largest concentration of forest carbon offsets traded on the California carbon market. But while these projects bring new investments to Appalachia, most people in Appalachia are not benefiting.

The effect of this new economic activity is evident in the Clearfork Valley, a forested region of steep hills and meandering creeks on the Kentucky-Tennessee border.

As the federal government distributes $42.5 billion to expand broadband internet access across America and its territories, some local leaders are asking themselves: How much economic impact could faster internet create?

The true dollar figure would be spread across the economy, from agriculture and small businesses to harder-to-track impacts like an increased willingness for families to relocate to rural areas.

On June 8, 2023, Lindsay Yeager of Cortez, Colorado, woke up to a barrage of text messages, asking if she had heard about the local birth center closing. Yeager immediately sprang into action. By that evening, protesters gathered across the street from the city’s hospital with placards and a purpose: keeping the birthing center open.

Republican voters in Hancock County largely rejected Donald Trump eight years ago, giving him less than a fifth of the vote in the GOP caucuses. As recently as a year ago, some party faithful here and elsewhere in Iowa seemed eager to move on, saying they were tired of the former president’s chaos and liabilities.