A Micro-Paean to County Highway

The May-June 2026 issue of County Highway arrived last week. Its slogan, "America's Only Newspaper" is apt, but is it even proper to call it a "newspaper"? The medium is newsprint . . . the old broadsheet format, which I greatly enjoy for some tactile reason that escapes the ravishes of my left hemisphere's rationality . . . but the content ain't the slop (AI-generated and leftist-generated) found in newspapers today. The content is literary, its writers channeling the style of New Journalism ghosts Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson.

You can find that style in a handful of magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, but I don't trust 'em. Their glossy covers reflect the content: glossy propaganda for the leftist establishment. I ascribe to the hazy opinion that truth succumbs to style. If every sentence is written beautifully, every sentence must be true, and if every paragraph is built of true sentences, the paragraph must be beautiful and true, and if an essay consists solely of beautiful and true paragraphs, it must be beautiful and true and good. (Yes, I've read my Balthasar.)

So when I read stylistic essays in leftist magazines, I existentially recoil. I don't know whether it's the magazine's stylish prose cracking my ideology and making me uncomfortable or Satan cracking my soul and making me damned. I just know I recoil.

There's none of that with County Highway. I've been worshiping at its inky altar for a year now and I have zero clue where it stands politically. Which is the way it should be.

So please, go subscribe. Yes, it's $50 annually, for six issues. That's steep but it's worth the monetary climb.

The One-Thing Files

So, on the off chance you think you can get rich off jade, it might be helpful to know that you can’t. Jade is the toughest natural material, the Cadillac of Stone Age tools, so tough it was used for anvils before the advent of iron. But if you consider Big Sur jade’s place in the broader world market, it hardly makes a blip. No one makes much of a living from it. Its true value lies in its potential to deepen your connection to the landscape, and to open the door to adventure.

Jade Divers of Big Sur | Valen Lambert

America’s Only Newspaper

County HighwayValen Lambert

What does it mean to be free, when our every thought is smelted down into algorithmic refuse? When our attention is commodified to no end? O, postmodern life. Where have all the good Transcendentalists gone? They’re out in the woods, and they’re never coming out.