Get to know your rural neighbors, one weekly story
at a time.
My Fellow Americans is a weekly newsletter that brings rural stories to urban and suburban readers. Each week, one story spotlights the people, communities, and organizations you don’t know but should: the farmer at your market, the family who just lost their local hospital, the town watching a data center arrive. These stories are playing out in your county, your state, your region, and your country. They affect your life, whether you know it or not.
The fates of Americans are linked across rural, urban, and suburban lines. Getting to know each other is where our shared reality will start, allowing us to imagine a more sustainable future, together.
Why this exists
Rural communities hold roughly a fifth of the population and steward most of the land, water, and farmland that feed, power, and sustain the nation. In other words, the food on our table and the electricity in our walls start in rural communities. Meanwhile, our cities hold the media attention and much of the capital. The truth is that we’re interconnected and interdependent.
Stereotypes and the conflict economy have kept us apart. A shared reality starts with understanding what is happening to a neighbor you’ve never met. Collective action can follow. This is a step toward closing that gap. Read the first issue →
How it works
Every week, one featured story. The Story is free. It rotates between original reporting, commentary on a rural story, interviews with reputable sources, first-person storytelling, and expert features. Every story is fact-anchored and it ends with three lines:
Know: the one fact or structural cause to take away
Consume: a longer piece on the same topic, to go deeper
Do: one concrete action tied to that week’s story
Paid subscribers also get This Week in Rural America: annotated links to the week’s most important stories from rural communities, plus a searchable archive.
Become a Founding Fellow AmericanWho’s behind it
I’m Nina Mishkin, the writer behind My Fellow Americans. I’m a marketing and communications strategist, and I have spent my career helping organizations tell stories that move people. I’m based in Los Angeles and spent years in New York, but grew up on the suburban-rural border. I’ve explored tens of thousands of miles across America (45 states, 31 national parks, and counting) and am endlessly amazed by the vast diversity of this country.
Like many, the past 15+ years of conflict and polarization have hit me hard and I’ve been taking on projects that aim to inspire social change. My Fellow Americans is built out of an experience I had in 2024 while canvassing in eastern Michigan. I was struck by how much I, an urbanite, had in common with my fellow rural Americans. I saw that we all wanted the same thing — a sustainable life for ourselves and our neighbors: decent jobs, affordable groceries, manageable living costs, and access to health care.
The sooner we can ground in that shared understanding, the sooner we can work together to build a better shared reality. With this project, I want to help my fellow urban and suburban Americans foster a genuine connection with our rural neighbors, creating a deep appreciation for our shared fates.
I’ll approach every issue with intellectual humility, curiosity, care, and respect. I hope you’ll practice the same. Every fact links to its source. If I get something wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it.
This newsletter is an independent project. To support our shared reality, 10% of all paid subscription revenue is donated to Farm Aid, which works to build a strong and resilient family farm system of agriculture. That commitment is permanent and isn’t tied to whether their work appears in a given issue.