After distilling more than 800,000 square miles of America’s heartland into the singular “Midwest,” this is what you’re left with: deep-fried Snickers bars at state fairs; thick heat; pulverizing winters; alternating and unending fields of soybeans and corn; “Minnesota nice”; families of five spilling out from their crossover SUVs at a Dairy Queen along the highway as the sun slips below the silver maples on the horizon’s edge. Maybe “Midwest” sounds aspirational, the kind of place where family and industry and agriculture thrive. Or maybe it conjures up a province of nothingness, a flat, static swath to be flown over or interminably driven through. Like anywhere, the Midwest is much more than its clichés. When essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan called it “the most nowhere part of America,” he was championing its deceptive complexity, given that the more time you spend there, “you find that each of the different nowherenesses has laid claim to its own somewhereness.”
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