“They’re Taylor Swift fans,” the woman cleaning the floor beside me helpfully explains. “They’re very nice, but they leave glitter everywhere.”

Is County Highway, the new newspaper for America written and edited by living human beings, selling out in its second issue or weeding out its readership by publishing a five-page article on Taylor Swift’s Eros concert in Seattle? I can’t say I was prepared to read it, but I did, and taking two pages before getting to Swift herself was helpful. (I shouldn’t say that, because I don’t dislike I’ve heard of her music. I can still a few lines, but as a 50+ year old man, I feel I have better things to listen to, like maybe K-pop.) Writer David Samuels contrasts the messaging in Swift’s concert with the reality of living in Seattle, where cops have no power to handle public harassers and residents learn to ignore all humans around them in an effort to Do No Harm to the ones who’ve intended harm to themselves. The mostly female concert audience affirmed they were cute and deserved better—yeah, that’s the message the city needs to hear. If only music would get them there.

What’s in the rest of this issue? There’s a lengthy piece on Mule Days, “The Greatest Mule Show on Earth,” in Bishop, California, which used to be “one of the biggest agricultural festivals in America.” There’s an essay on logging in July, another on the equinox, and one about a 1986 cookbook called White Trash Cooking–“A Confederate general and a gay man who liked cole slaw have more in common with each other than with a Yankee.”

There’s an article about interviewing one of the men who claim to know Many Important Details about extraterrestrials and UFOs and is both eager and reluctant to share. If you watched some of the congressional hearings on UFOs several weeks ago, you probably saw this guy. Yes, he knew critical details; no, he couldn’t share them openly.

There’s an interesting piece on how GPS changes the way we understand our environment, our local world. Alex Perez has a humorous story about professional wrestling in Puerto Rico. There’s a chilling account of corrupt dealings with Columbian presidents and the Clinton Foundation.

Perhaps the heart of County Highway can be seen in this quote from the essay, “The Bull Calf,” by Sage Radecki.

Trying like hell to fix something we saw as a problem, when in reality, it wasn’t ours to fix. Nature, in all its beauty and sorrows, is something we cannot overcome. It’s simply something we need to make space for. I’m learning this daily here, on the ranch, in our work in the field and my time tending to the garden.

That’s a good word.