A New Populist Broadsheet on American Life and Art

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Screenshot from County Highway’s website.

In Airmail, the online-only, cosmopolitan publication started by Graydon Carter, the former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, Ash Carter (Graydon’s son) talks to David Samuels and Walter Kirn about their new print-only publication, County Highway, which is nearly the opposite of Airmail— “‘If The New Yorker made New York City into a small town,’ Kirn says, ‘we’re going to make the small towns of America into New York City’”:

The first issue of their 20-page, print-only broadsheet, which bills itself as “a magazine about America in the form of a 19th century newspaper,” went on sale last week in selected bookstores, record stores, coffee shops, and dry-goods emporiums across all 50 states, from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, to Grand Forks, North Dakota. The paper’s stockist list reads like the itinerary of a whistle-stop tour from when presidents had mustaches. (They do, however, have a Web site and an Instagram account.)

With its intricate, pastoral nameplate, multi-deck headlines, and leisurely features, County Highway has the look, feel, and even smell of an artifact. But it was conceived by its founders to meet the technological moment. “Because of COVID, two large transformations happened,” Samuels says. “Remote work became acceptable. And that meant it was viable to live in the countryside or someplace you wanted to live and still make money from large urban economies.” It’s not quite the exodus some had predicted, but based on the latest census estimates, there are signs of a brain drain.

Traditionally, magazines were a portal from Nowheresville to the Big City. Samuels and Kirn want to transport readers in the other direction. “For every person who actually moved out and started beekeeping,” Samuels says, “there’s 10 people who still live in cities because they have to but wish they lived somewhere else. And this product is as much for those people as it is for the ones who actually bought that vineyard.”

I say “nearly the opposite of Airmail” because clearly there’s some overlap in the intended audience of both publications. This isn’t a critique, just an observation. Both Samuels and Kirn, however, have become “staunch populists, increasingly critical of, and controversial within, mainstream political discourse.” Carter writes:

Samuels is regarded with suspicion for his 2015 New York Times Magazine profile of Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, which suggested that the White House press corps had been duped into backing the Iran deal, and for his contrarian political writings, while Kirn has raised eyebrows for his regular appearances on the Fox News talk show Gutfeld! and for his podcast, America This Week, co-hosted by Matt Taibbi.

Subscriptions for County Highway start at $50 a year for six issues. Learn more here.

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In other news, Megan Fox will publish a book of poetry called Pretty Boys are Poisonous in November to release her body from the weight of men’s sins: “‘These poems were written in an attempt to excise the illness that had taken root in me because of my silence,’ Fox, 37, said in a statement. ‘I’ve spent my entire life keeping the secrets of men, my body aches from carrying the weight of their sins.’”