Inside the newspaper office in Winters, California, earlier this year (James Fallows)

This post is to introduce a new email newsletter that I hope you’ll be interested in. It’s about the “American Futures” reporting project that my wife Deb and I have been undertaking through the past year and are ready to take in what we think will be exciting new directions.

When we began this project for The Atlantic in the summer of 2013, with our colleagues at Marketplace radio and the digital-mapping company Esri, our idea was to visit some of the smaller towns and cities the media tend to overlook, to see  how people were adjusting to the economic, environmental, and technological opportunities and challenges of this era.

Reinvention and resilience across the nation
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This was a variant on the classic road-trip approach to reporting the diverse realities of America, the variant being that we were making the journey in a little Cirrus SR-22 propeller plane. Since only a few small towns are on an Interstate, but nearly all of them have local airports—a total of 5,000 across the country—this has allowed us to range among places as far-flung as Eastport, Maine and Redlands, California, or Duluth, Minnesota and Columbus, Mississippi. In the months ahead we’re planning to travel through the Central Valley of California; to the American Prairie Reserve in Montana; to coal country in Tennessee and Kentucky, and rural Alabama; and many places more.

By now we’ve done two articles in the print edition of The Atlantic; with our reporting colleague John Tierney we’ve done well over 200 on-line features; we’ve joined Kai Ryssdal and his Marketplace team for reports from South Dakota, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Maine, and other corners of the country; we’ve done video and audio features for The Atlantic’s site; and we’ve made speeches and presentations across the country.

We’ve learned about tidal-energy projects, about the rise of craft brewing, about how old cities are attracting young residents to their downtowns, about the surprising role that libraries are playing in the digital age, and a dozen themes more.

Deb has a background in linguistics and has reported on regional language patterns, as well as stories of innovative schools, refugee resettlements, arts programs, and the fun of flying. John is a former college political-science professor and has written about innovations at community colleges and research universities — and also the craft-distillery movement, neighborhood-redevelopment efforts, and the public architecture of the Great Plains. We’ve ended each day of reporting very tired, but even more excited and surprised by what we’ve learned.

We’ve found this project every bit as engaging as we expected, but we’ve also discovered something we hadn’t foreseen. There is a pattern that connects the individual stories we’ve reported, and that sharply differs from the tone of most coverage we read or hear. At the national level, American politics is bitterly polarized, and the mood of the country can seem fearful and downcast. But city by city we’ve seen examples of collaboration, practical-minded compromise, long-term investment in a region’s future, and a coast-to-coast resurgence in manufacturing and other startup activity.

Deb Fallows, John Tierney, and I are producing reports for this project on The Atlantic’s site almost every day. You can find a master collection of them here: http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/american-futures/  But with the daily surge of material appearing so often on TheAtlantic.com, we wanted to make it easier for readers who are interested to follow the reports we’re putting up. That’s why we’ve decided to start this newsletter.