America Beneath
the Noise

In 2022, I dismantled my life and went looking. I wanted to understand what was happening to the country -- and to myself.

What followed became an experiment in slow exploration. Rather than passing through places as a visitor, I began living in them. Over four years, I made homes in more than forty communities across the United States, Europe, and Latin America -- spending weeks and months at a time walking unfamiliar streets, riding local buses, lingering in coffee shops and libraries, attending community events, and talking with anyone willing to share a piece of their story.

The journey led through tribal lands and border communities, industrial cities and farming towns, state capitals and forgotten main streets. It revealed extraordinary beauty and stubborn resilience. It exposed old wounds that never fully healed and new fractures emerging beneath the surface of contemporary life.

America Beneath the Noise emerged from those miles, conversations, observations, and encounters. Part exploration, part fieldwork, and part storytelling project, it is an ongoing effort to explore the gap between the country we debate and the country people actually experience. Through essays, photography, and public conversation, I am exploring what becomes visible when we slow down, stay longer, and allow places to reveal themselves on their own terms. You can follow the journey through the Finding America newsletter or go deeper through the long-form essays from the road.

What I found: the America we argue about is often very different from the America people actually live in.

It is more complicated, more wounded, more human, and more beautiful than the story we've been told.

The odyssey continues.