September 8, 2026
The Best Southern Thing We Saw This Week: Friday Night Lights
A small-town high school football game, where the whole town shows up under the lights and remembers, for a few hours, that it is one thing.
Weekly series
The Best Southern Thing We Saw This Week
One small, wonderful Southern find, every week.
Installments
August 25, 2026
The Front Porch, Part Two: On the Art of Sitting a Spell
We wrote once about why the South built porches. This is about what people did on them: the lost art of sitting, watching, and letting the evening pass.
August 15, 2026
The Courthouse Square, and the Town That Grew Around It
In a thousand Southern towns, everything points to the same place: the courthouse on the square. Here is why it was built that way, and why it still holds.
July 28, 2026
The Last of the Whole-Hog Pitmasters
Cooking a whole pig over wood coals from dark to dawn is one of the oldest crafts in the South, and one of the fastest disappearing.
July 21, 2026
The Last of the Water-Powered Mills
A creek, a wheel, and two stones once ground a community's cornmeal. A few of those mills still turn, and the meal they make tastes like nothing from a bag.
July 11, 2026
The Sweetgrass Basket Makers of the Lowcountry
A craft carried across an ocean and kept alive for three hundred years, coiled one blade of grass at a time.
July 4, 2026
The Last of the Shrimp Boats
The boats still go out before light, but there are fewer of them every year, and the men who run them know exactly what is being lost.
June 27, 2026
The Best Southern Thing We Saw This Week: The Hardware Store That Never Closed
An old downtown hardware store with creaking floors and a man who can find a single hinge in a drawer without looking. A quietly hopeful place.
June 20, 2026
The Best Southern Thing We Saw This Week: A Small-Town Theater Lights Up Again
A small-town marquee comes on again after years of dark, and a town decides the place where it once gathered is worth gathering in again.