By Zachary Michael Jack

The modern college schedule seems designed to keep students from spending much time at home during the holidays. Are colleges afraid of rural students reconnecting with their families and communities?

For some, the holidays amount to forced detention in a house crowded with turkey, cousins, and expectations. The free-in-spirit long for elbow room and a Swisher Sweet.

Marketers portray Cyber Monday as the clean, socially conscious, and “cool” alternative to Black Friday. Are online shoppers really morally superior to those who prefer to – or must – shop in brick-and-mortar stores with other humans?

Commodity agriculture affects the neighbors and community, as well as the farmers’ bottom line. Just ask anyone who lives downwind from a hog farm. Are the people who will vote to legalize marijuana ready to live next to an “herb” farm?

The culture of farming is hard to define and mark down into neat rows and checkboxes . So is defining who is and who isn’t a farmer. Today, the barriers to being officially identified as a farmer are low, but the roadblocks to making it…

In this rural Iowa community, a family graveyard helps the past and its people enliven the present.

In the countryside, winter may not defeat you. But it will teach the value of a strategic retreat. Come inside and warm up for a minute – the snow will wait.

Colleges have figured out how to extract resources from grateful alumni who long ago left campus. Small towns should adopt a similar strategy for harvesting investments from young people who have moved on but remain connected and…

Many of us have weeded old-fashioned figures of speech out of our everyday conversations. Maybe it’s time to start preserving “Barnyard English” as a threatened cultural treasure.