Does spring make you yearn for the open road? These four rural road trips feature iconic America: along a craggy coast, deep into a preserved Jurassic-era past, through a remnant of tall grass prairie, and up and over an Appalachian bald. A Whale of a Trip: Strait of Juan de Fuca Scenic Byway, Washington Washington’s Highway 112 is the Strait of Juan de Fuca National Scenic Byway. The 61-mile span hugs the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula along a glacial fjord, where visitors experience wildlife migrations, views of ocean waves crashing against sea stacks, and the ancestral lands of two I ..read more

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Olivia Paschal is a journalist studying rural history and political economy at the University of Virginia. Enjoy our conversation about uneven development in Northwest Arkansas, bike trails in the boonies, and back ways into corporate archives, b ..read more

Marlene DeClue was heading home after her second radiation treatment for cancer when she decided to pull over and buy the Greenfield Vedette.  It wasn’t, however, just one copy of the newspaper she pulled from a newsstand on the street. It was more than 150 years of them, which instead of tucked under her arm, she carried in her heart.  The Vedette is where she had worked as editor for 35 years before retiring in 2018. But when she heard the corporate owners were set to close the publication at the end of 2023, it just took a beat – of time, and of heart – to make a decision.  ..read more

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in Mile Markers, a twice monthly newsletter from Open Campus about the role of colleges in rural America. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox. “Here’s how I describe Hendry County to anybody who is thinking about it,” begins Michael Swindle, a former teacher and the county’s current superintendent. First, you have to talk about the geography here in the heart of central southern Florida, where miles of untouched swampland sits just a sun ray’s edge over the Eve ..read more

Hiromi Katayama had been in the U.S. for less than a year, studying for an MFA in art at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, when she happened upon a cherry blossom tree near her studio. She’d been questioning the decision to leave her native Japan.  Katayama says her education in the arts in Japan was very different from her education here. There, she says, an instructor would tell her what to do and she did it, while here in the States she was being encouraged to talk about her art and how it was an expression of who she is. She was grappling with that. But that cherry blossom tree sp ..read more

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see?  Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week. Every so often, I encounter a capital-E environmentalist – someone with an environmental academic degree and a job at one of the big nonprofits from which I’ve somehow accumulated dozens of ballpoint pens – who asks me (when really they’re telling me) about how it must be really hard to discuss the environment, or more specifically climate change, with ..read more

Rural America is teeming with innovation, opportunity, and solutions to many flawed economic policies. And it always has been. Counter to the common narrative of the decline of all things rural, both history and experience tell a different story.  Because necessity is the mother of invention, rural America has always been and continues to be, the most experienced national proving ground for creative deployments of capital, revitalizations at scale, and far-reaching systems change. Equating innovation and modernity with metro and urban areas is not new. Media outlets, publications, and po ..read more

This story was originally published by The Conversation. Students in rural America still lack access to high-speed internet at home despite governmental efforts during the pandemic to fill the void. This lack of access negatively affects their academic achievement and overall well-being. The situation has been getting worse as the urgency of the pandemic has receded. Those findings are based on a new study we did to determine the post-pandemic outlook on internet access for rural students. During the pandemic, school districts quickly deployed emergency resources such as Wi-Fi hot spots ..read more

A new study from the American Academy of Family Physicians’ Robert Graham Center (AAFP), co-funded by the Milbank Memorial Fund and The Physicians Foundation, has found that communities across the country are struggling to meet the demand for primary care physicians, as well as to retain those physicians in their communities. While it’s difficult all over, Dr. Yalda Jabbarpour, lead researcher on the study, said, it is more difficult for rural communities. “Ten years ago, we knew we had a problem with primary care physician density,” Jabbarpour said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “Tod ..read more

This story was originally published by KFF Health News. Pediatrician Patricia Braun and her team saw roughly 100 children at a community health clinic on a recent Monday. They gave flu shots and treatments for illnesses like ear infections. But Braun also did something most primary care doctors don’t. She peered inside mouths searching for cavities or she brushed fluoride varnish on their teeth. “We’re seeing more oral disease than the general population. There is a bigger need,” Braun said of the patients she treats at Bernard F. Gipson Eastside Family Health Center, which is part of Denver ..read more