I recently read an article in The New York Times about a preppie revival, how the graduates of socially elite boarding schools were opening bars in my old neighborhood, and I suddenly realized that one of the reasons I enjoy living in America's sticks is that no one ever writes articles about the places I live now, glibly characterizing the people who live there while telling interested readers what the trends here are or who the hottest writers under forty are. There are trends here, I am sure, but they roll off me like water off a duck's back. It did used to fill me with a weird existential chill, reading superficial bullcrap about the actual people and places of my daily life, seeing it all transformed, always in idea if not always in fact, into an upscale shopping mall: X is the new Y.