Introducing County Highway

I have absolutely nothing to do with this but I’d like you all to know about it because it’s cool. It’s a real newspaper that will arrive in your mailbox and one you can hold in your hands. Here is more info, or you can head right to the site.

We’re starting a new magazine in the form of an old-fashioned 19th century American newspaper called County Highway, and we think you might like it.

County Highway is not a website. It is a 20-page broadsheet produced by actual human beings containing the best new writing you will encounter about America. Our magazine reports on the political and spiritual crises that are gripping our country and their deeper cultural and historical sources, in a way that is inspired by our favorite American writers, including Herman Melville, Ralph Ellison, David Foster Wallace, Mark Twain, Joan Didion, and William Least Heat-Moon.

It also includes regular columns about agriculture, herbal medicine, and living off the grid; essays about literature and art; a section devoted to music; and pen-and-ink illustrations by some of America’s leading tattoo artists.

It comes out six times a year and will be delivered to your home in a transparent envelope. Once the paper is removed, you can hold it in your hands, fold it into quarters, and read it on your porch on a sunny afternoon accompanied by your favorite cup of coffee, cigarette, or can of beer.

What you can’t do is find our stories on the Internet. You can only get it by subscription, or by purchasing individual copies from our network of bookstores and record shops at the price of $8.50 per issue. Once it’s in your hands, no one can ever flush it down a memory-hole, or track your eye-movements as you read it.

We invite you to subscribe here.

County Highway was born during the Covid lockdowns, when we and many others became disillusioned by both large cities and digital culture. Some of us found new places that we loved. Some of us have always preferred living near lakes and forests. Some of us stayed in cities but began seeing how the ways of living and thinking that they currently cultivate no longer promised an expansion of personal and creative freedom, but rather the reverse. We share in common a revulsion at the shitty aesthetics of the culture being forced upon us by monopoly tech platforms and corporate media, and a burning desire to make something better.

Inside our newspaper, you will find reports by people who picked themselves up and went to new places, met new people, and saw new things. Some of our articles are funny, and others are written by people who are seriously pissed-off and/or believe that the world is coming to an end.

Because Americans are a musically gifted people, we have an entire section devoted to musicians and songs.

While we are inspired by American places and people, we are not playing at being backwoods innocents, or hoping to convey homespun local wisdom like a print version of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon. We hope to advance the same relationship to America that Bob Dylan had when he wrote his versions of folk songs, or that Gram Parsons and Neil Young had when they wrote their versions of country songs. We believe in the wisdom of the Americans, who produced not only the congeniality of Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse but also the lunatic wildness of Yosemite Sam, Roadrunner, Biggie Smalls and the Ramones.

We are the happy recipients of a great gift, which is the practical genius that is present in the way that Americans tell stories, crack jokes and write songs.

If you’d like to join us, sign up here.

Sincerely,

David Samuels & Walter Kirn