The Latest Issue of ‘County Highway’ Is Out, and It May Just Be the Best Yet

[View this email in your browser]( Volume 1, Issue 6 is hot off the presses! Well folks, we’ve completed our sixth issue, the last of our debut volume, and it’s among our strongest yet. A sense of wonder has come over us, watching these latest copies being whisked around the country by our trusty postal workers. In less than a year, we’ve earned more than 11,000 annual subscribers and amassed 350 unique [stockists]( across all fifty states. We began this newspaper cautiously optimistic, but we didn’t dare imagine such wild enthusiasm so early, nor at such a scale. We must be on to something here. County Highway is a 20-page broadsheet that you can hold in your hands, fold into quarters, and read on your porch on a sunny afternoon accompanied by your favorite cup of coffee, cigarette, or can of beer. We honor and preserve the distinctiveness of the American voice by publishing essayists, critics, and reporters whose work embodies the virtues of Mark Twain and his literary heirs — from Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow to Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, Mary McCarthy, and William Least Heat Moon. Edited by longform master David Samuels, and co-founded by novelist and screenwriter Walter Kirn, County Highway serves up a road-side banquet of American humor, common-speech, and social and political insights in every issue. Are you excited to [subscribe]( but need a little more to chew on before you do? Just keep scrolling for a sneak peek into Issue 6, assembled just for you… The Front Page Above the fold we have Walter Kirn potholing around Utah, Jonah Raskin’s hunt for Peter Plate, Ted Mann smoking cigars with his old buddy Kinky Friedman, Farahn Morgan meeting a “real gambler,” and Ian Frazier as “Mr. Doesn’t-Know-Anything.” Below the fold, David Samuels rides a Greyhound to Memphis, where he learns the Greyhound Bus Company is a not-so-pleasant fiction and that the ducks in the Peabody Hotel lobby are magnificent enough to stop anybody in their tracks, even Elvis. * * * Southland Michael Lind leads with an ode to the late Judge Harrison of Blanco County, Texas — who resembled Atticus Finch if he was “short, stocky, and balding” — while explaining why so many squirrels in Blanco are without their tails. Farahn Morgan continues her dive into the machinations of recently legalized gambling, exploring a local casino where “the swirling symphony of stimulation and secondhand smoke is all part of the game.” * * * Inside the Fold Sterling HolyWhiteMountain choses beauty over death with the help of Miles Davis, Henry Miller, and an old shopkeeper boss turned drinking buddy — “the kind of guy for whom the question ‘Do you party?’ meant a specific sort of thing.” Ted Mann’s column returns with a rumination on how artists use our yearnings, the indignities of age, Kinky Friedman being the sentimental romantic that he is, and what makes a mountain. * * * Tunes & Reviews Miles Weatherby details the demise of Coachella — America’s most notorious music festival — and why its symptoms are largely the result of doing so many things right (hint: hipsters, drugs, and “spicy pie” are not to blame). Susannah Samuels laments the “insufferable oldheads” and their CBGB obsession in her latest essay pondering the current state of punkers (while making allowances for the normies among us), before following up with another Critic’s Corner and a fresh playlist. Being chock-full of stories from Utah, Montana, Virginia, Texas, California, Tennessee, British Columbia, New York, and the beaches of France nearly 80 years ago, this latest issue is further proof that we’re America’s Only Newspaper. Count on us to keep the wheels turning, as we’re just getting started. Your friends, County Highway Copyright © 2024 Tablet Magazine, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you signed up at our website, www.tabletmag.com. Our mailing address is: Tablet Magazine P.O. Box 20079New York, NY 10001 [Add us to your address book]( Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](.