Well, here’s why I live here: Much like the guy in the cover story, I grew up in Indiana, which is one of the Midwest’s more Midwestern-y states (if you are in Hilton Head on vacation, there’s about an 80% chance it’s the state immediately to your west). If  you’ve never been there, Indiana is a lovely place, filled with vast fields, hardy salt-of-the-earth people, frequent auto-race fumes, a pretty serious addiction to news involving Peyton Manning and almost no beaches whatsoever.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There are beaches on Lake Michigan in the northwest corner of Indiana, a region with the clever nickname of The Region, which is used to mask the fact that it’s like 100 square miles of steel mills, some of which are thriving and most of which aren’t anymore.