Flyover Country — Notes and News
Est. 2026  ·  flyovercountry.us
Flyover Country
Notes & News from the broad, complicated, beautiful middle of America — what the coasts fly over on the way to somewhere they think matters more.
By Robert J. Burtis  ·  Somewhere between the coasts
Notes & News From Flyover Country

You subscribe to the New York Times. You watch NBC News, maybe FOX, maybe both. Podcasters, pundits, and CNN contributors are as unavoidable as humidity in August. They are everywhere. And most of them have never been here.

"Here" is the overwhelming majority of the country that two media corridors — New York and Washington/Arlington — routinely fly over on their way to a headline. I live here. I drive across it every week. I notice things. Not partisan things. Not coastal things. Just... things. Patterns. Questions nobody seems to be asking. That's what this is about.

— Robert J. Burtis · Somewhere between the coasts
Quick Hits
Notes & News The Pattern Said Then, Said Now The Car Wash Economy Holiday & Culture Spotlight The AI Series The Tangle Series
The Throughline Look past what's seen to what's unseen. The Pattern follows that idea through money. The Solidarity Con follows it through rhetoric. Both borrow the lens from a 19th-century Frenchman named Bastiat. How it all fits together →
Top of the Fold
Notes & News
Majoring in Followers
Colleges now offer degrees in becoming a social media influencer. More than half of creators earn under $15,000 a year, while the median plumber earns nearly $63,000. So who is this degree really for?
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Under the Fold
The Pattern
Seven Trucks, One Street
When our trash bill nearly doubled, I got up at 6 a.m. with a clipboard. Seven haulers on the same streets, a recycling fee you can't opt out of, and how St. Paul does it for less.
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Latest Articles
Said Then, Said Now
Spring Forward, Fall Back, Flip-Flop
The series begins: daylight saving time, one president with five positions in seven years, and the industries that wanted the extra hour all along.
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The Tangle Series
Grading My Own Homework
A third, AI-assisted audit of Tangle's sourcing confirms two earlier surveys and puts a hard number on where the "balanced" claim needs a qualifier.
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The Pattern
The Solidarity Con, Part 7: The Sleeper Issue
Data centers, small nuclear reactors, and the one thing red and blue politicians agree on: court the deal quietly, then run from it publicly.
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Notes & News
Flo, Dr. Rick, and the Monster Made of Sticky Notes
Progressive's ad agency is doing good, funny, well-made work. That's exactly what makes the underlying question worth asking: what is a billion-dollar ad war actually buying you as a customer?
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Spotlight
The $10,000,000 Challenge
Clay Travis says a boys' high school team would beat the WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces — and he's put $10 million behind it.
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The Pattern
The Solidarity Con, Part 3: Democratic Socialist Electoral Strategy
DSA-aligned tenant politics and the landlord lobby both claim to speak for a sympathetic underdog — while the money and power sit somewhere else entirely.
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The Tangle Series
What a Poll Doesn't Ask
Tangle's readers were asked to pick one way to shrink the federal deficit. The seven options on offer say as much as the answers do.
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Notes & News
The Fiscal Shackle
Argentina just told its politicians: run a deficit, lose your paycheck. Americans overwhelmingly want term limits too.
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Notes & News
Leave the Virgins Out of It
Where the "72 virgins" trope actually comes from, what research says really drives terrorists — and why laughing at the punchline lets them off too easy.
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Notes & News
Is Uber Over?
Uber built an empire on disruption — now Waymo is running the same play on Uber.
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The AI Series
The Brain's Hallucination Problem
A neuroscience essay on predictive processing never once mentions that "hallucination" is exactly what it's describing.
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The Tangle Series
The View From Nowhere Near Here
A second, more extensive audit of Tangle's sources finds 92% of all citations originate in three East Coast zip codes.
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The Pattern
The Solidarity Con, Part 2: Federal Program Fraud
A $250 million fraud network — and the state agencies that were supposed to stop it — ran the same five-step pattern.
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The Pattern
Too Much Storage?
Self-storage facilities are sprouting on nearly every block in the Twin Cities. Who's really banking on all this empty space?
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The AI Series
Collaboration, Not Abdication
What AI actually does for my writing — and why making something better has never required an apology.
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Notes & News
The News Is Dead
A fact-checked digest of the viral Fourth Wall video — what holds up, what's overstated.
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Notes & News
Who Gave Them the Keys?
So how did unqualified drivers end up behind the wheel of an 18-wheeler?
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The AI Series
They Said the Same Thing About the Printing Press
Every generation has its AI panic. Every generation has been wrong.
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The Pattern
The Solidarity Con, Part 1: Immigration Enforcement
A five-step pattern of claimed victimhood, secured benefit, and quiet abandonment.
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The AI Series
Ten Percent of What?
Two Medium writers, the same AI extinction headlines, opposite conclusions — and the school strike in Minab that isn't a forecast.
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Coming Soon

In the Pipeline

  • The Nicest Place You'll Never Be Able to Afford — Senior living economics
  • Corn in the Tank — Midwest ethanol, federal mandates, and who really profits (The Solidarity Con)
  • Sorted, Then Dumped? — What actually happens to all that carefully separated recycling (The Solidarity Con)
  • Who Feeds the Hungry? — Food banks, SNAP, and the programs in between (The Solidarity Con)
  • Towers on Every Corner — Cell tower oddities and duplicated services (The Solidarity Con)
  • Following the Money to the Animals — Animal charities and the fundraising business
  • A Better Board for Tangle — A comment section that works like the newsletter
  • Nobody Home at the Help Desk — AI music and video companies, and the tech support that isn't there
  • Special Delivery, From Above — Amazon's delivery drones arrive
  • The Dopamine Machine — Social media and the scroll that never ends
  • Minneapolis, Boxed In — The walls going up along our freeways
  • The Most Popular Word on TV — Four letters, bleeped and unbleeped

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