Happy Saturday!
Last weekend, we offered a glimpse into Southern history through a piece on the “Rebel Yell.” This weekend, our journey heads north to Ohio, the former center of Longaberger, famed for its basketry and chronicled by American Artifacts writer Jonny Gartner (and many others). Elsewhere in this newsletter, you’ll find an essay suggestion from me, a book review by Greg Fournier, recommendations from Dispatch intern Hannah Epstein, and a Work of the Week.
Today on the site, Dispatch contributing writer Leah Libresco Sargeant explores the Vance family’s fourth child and reveals how many people maintain a surprisingly laissez-faire attitude toward family size. “Despite all the talk of ‘planned parenthood,’ many parents conceive during moments of ambiguous feelings,” Leah writes. “As some fertility guides phrase it, there’s ‘trying to conceive,’ ‘trying to avoid,’ and ‘trying to whatever.’”
We also have Nic Rowan, managing editor of The Lamp, reflecting on a recent trip to Rome, the challenge of overtourism, and a smarter way to travel. “Those who travel solely to seek fulfillment, treating it as a quasi-mystical quest, à la Eat, Pray, Love, are on a fool’s errand,” Rowan writes.
Finally, our latest entry in our “Where I’m From” series comes from Alex Perez, editor of RealClearBooks and a Miami native. “Like so many others, I was born here because my parents left Cuba after the bearded guy took over,” Perez writes. “They escaped, and now I live in a place where escape is a way of life. It’s slow and it’s fast-paced all at once and it often feels that even with all the movement, nobody’s really going anywhere.”
Cheers,
Valerie
American Relics
By Jonny Gartner
The summer I turned twenty-one, I spent it living with my grandmother in her quiet southwestern Ohio farming town. Among the many chores she assigned, the most crucial—at least in her eyes—was sorting the mail.
Every afternoon I would stroll down her 100-foot driveway, pop open the small door of the black mailbox on the curb, and carry the contents back inside. Then Grandma and I would stand together at the kitchen counter, separating the junk from the important envelopes, placing the latter into the Longaberger basket that kept its place of honor beside the stove.
Rising about 10 inches tall and roughly six inches wide, this particular Longaberger basket was one of several dozen scattered throughout my grandmother’s house. For most of my childhood, these baskets were everywhere in our extended family—from picnic hampers to wastebaskets to Easter egg baskets—and they carry for me a certain nostalgia.
The Longaberger Basket Company used to be a titan of Midwestern manufacturing and was far more than just a local brand here in Ohio. Longaberger baskets became a cultural juggernaut that rose during the boom of multilevel-marketing firms in the latter half of the 20th century—my grandmother’s house was as full of Tupperware as it was of baskets.
Drawing on nearly a century of basket-making knowledge handed down through the Longaberger family, who hail from the banks of the Muskingum River in Dresden, Ohio, the company was founded in 1972 as a private producer and distributor of fine wicker baskets. It began with five weavers in a single building.
Over the next 25 years, the company grew into a “basket empire,” posting more than $1 billion in sales in 2000 and employing over 8,000 direct workers plus 70,000 sales associates across the country. Nothing showcased the family-owned enterprise’s ascent like its 180,000-square-foot basket-shaped headquarters, now empty just off State Route 16 on the outskirts of Newark, Ohio.
This vacancy followed the company’s closure in 2016 and its eventual bankruptcy filing in 2018. Yet the building itself remains, untouched after nearly a decade of vacancy; set among cornfields, soybeans, and the rolling hills of rural eastern Ohio, its large heated basket handles designed to prevent icing still loom over the landscape.
Such sights aren’t rare in Ohio, a state scattered with abandoned manufacturing plants. They stand as markers of America’s shifting economic terrain and of globalization’s broader reach. The nostalgia that has kept these structures standing, along with hopes for future reuse, anchors the building as a relic of a bygone era—a symbol of a state rooted in agriculture and manufacturing that has migrated toward something new.
When my grandmother passed away last summer, I inherited that small mail basket that once sat on her kitchen counter. Today the basket sits on my desk at home, often stuffed to the brim with my own mail, grandma’s letter opener protruding from the corner—an artifact in its own right, a testament to the enduring power of the everyday in the history of our country.
An Outside Perspective
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day—if you haven’t yet arranged something for your wife or mother, do it now—and today I thought I’d share a recent Dispatch contributor Nadya Williams’ essay for Mere Orthodoxy on how motherhood, despite its challenges, can be a source of joy. As Nadya writes:
During a typical week of parenting and homeschooling in my small town in rural Ohio, I spend hours reading and re-reading classic books to and with my children, reviewing Greek and Latin grammar, going to parks and playdates and ballet class, making experimental dishes just to see if it will work, and having the most unexpected conversations with my kids and their friends. There is a delight in spending time together with my kids, enjoying rediscovering activities that I once loved as a child but haven’t had time for since, and also seeing my kids discover their own interests and talents. I read much more since becoming a mom—not less. And, no less important, my reading is much more diverse now, because of my kids. But also, my kids are some of my favorite people around—because they are genuinely fun people to be around.
On Our Bookshelves
By Greg Fournier
Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir by Jayne Anne Phillips, published Apr 21, 2026.
Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir is the first nonfiction collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jayne Anne Phillips (Night Watch, 2024). The title is a touch misleading—it’s a set of essays rather than a continuous memoir—but taken together, the essays offer a window into the life of a woman from Buckhannon, West Virginia.
According to Phillips, the town sits “nestled in the Allegheny Mountains of north central West Virginia, home to generations of families, a place where history is interwoven with family stories and myths.” But this buoyant portrait of Americana is shadowed by “grinding, entrenched poverty, poverty that a modest monthly welfare check does little to alleviate.”
The prose in the collection is unexpectedly uneven. There are gorgeous, lyrical passages (“Now the lurch of the wagon and the creaking of the wheels begin to assert their dragging lull”) alongside awkward sentences (“Writers chastise themselves, with seriousness and skill, as though it were a matter of personal failure not to measure up to one’s talent—to the talent once displayed, or even during the present lull”). I anticipated more steadiness from a writer of such renown.
Phillips’s strongest moments come in her portraits of women’s relationships—a thread she revisits again and again. She feels a deep affection for her late mother, a schoolteacher who pursued a doctorate via night courses. One piece, “Rayme,” centers on a troubled woman who “slept on a small rug that she unrolled at night, or slept on the bare floor with the rug folded as a pillow.” Rayme is a haunting figure—once, while making soup, Phillips plucked a piece of linoleum from the pot. When asked why there was tile in the soup, Rayme snapped, “It’s clean.” Then: “If you’re not going to eat my food … don’t look at it.”
There’s also a notably moving essay about her dog Polly that captures the essence of human-dog bonds; an essay about the fiction writer Breece D’J Pancake, a fellow West Virginian whose premature death cut short a promising literary career; and an homage to West Virginia’s wilderness, “Paradise Lost: West Virginia,” which portrays a primordial Eden undone by rapacious strip mining.
All told, Small Town Girls is an enjoyable if sometimes vexing read, perhaps not fully deserving of the glowing praise it has attracted to date. The upside: I’ve found a writer whose fiction now sits on my radar.
Favorites We Recommend
By Hannah Epstein, intern
- Wendy Eisenberg, Wendy Eisenberg
The newest, self-titled album from Wendy Eisenberg, a Brooklyn-based improviser, guitarist, and singer-songwriter, is a sublime blend of Margo Guryan–style love songs and poignant nostalgia for youth. For full disclosure, I’m no expert in music. Yet as I near graduation and step into the realities of adulthood, Eisenberg’s softly spoken voice, paired with lines like “Another Lifetime Floats Away” (“All that I want prefers to taunt me with a half-lost memory/ I can’t really see from where I sit/ Is that how I wound up here?”) and “Will You Dare” (“But time has a funny way of laying you bare/ It pulls you and scares you and tangles your hair/ Asking: Will you dare?”) have become a comforting refuge. If you’re entering a new life chapter, find a quiet corner, put on headphones, and lose yourself in Eisenberg’s hauntingly beautiful new album—especially if you enjoy Haley Heynderickx, Kacy & Clayton, and Oracle Sisters.
- Frontier House, PBS
I’m not a voracious consumer of reality TV, but a few years back I discovered PBS’s 2002 reality show Frontier House and I was hooked. For the unfamiliar, the show is six episodes long and follows three families as they journey back to 1883 to emulate frontier living in the Montana Territory. And while today’s reality programs often focus on petty drama and sensational relationships, PBS’s Frontier House was a genuinely high-stakes, educational work of television. Alongside scenes of teenagers trudging through a surprise winter storm to milk a cow and debates over whether a contestant should be allowed to use anachronistic birth control, there’s a documentary voiceover that furnishes substantial context about frontier life. The result is a program that delivers the spectacle of traditional reality TV while also making you feel you’re learning something meaningful about American history. I’ve shown nearly all my college friends at least one episode, and I still evangelize the show whenever I can.
- 2013 Optimism
Music by The Lumineers and The Head and the Heart, plus office setups with ping-pong tables and bean bag chairs: that brief era of millennial optimism, perhaps exaggerated by my current Gen Z skepticism, remains alluring. Before 2016, many in my generation seemed more intent on enjoying life—whether through mustache-themed mugs or “Keep Calm and Carry On” tees—than on climbing the corporate ladder. In the face of today’s intergenerational frictions, I believe Gen Z could learn from the lighthearted, if occasionally irritating, joy that many millennials surrounded themselves with. As the once-leader of 2013 Optimism (also known as BuzzFeed) wrote, you only live once, so you might as well avoid living like a corporate automaton.
This Week’s Work
Work: Church in Square, Maurice Utrillo, dating to before 1926.
