This is what I saw one minute away from my house in DC yesterday morning.
Good news: Excellent craft beer in cans! Click on the photo for a beer-pornish enlarged and highly detailed view. And, that same excellent beer making its way from its Colorado homeland to my closest Kwik-E-Mart. You would not have seen this in any imagined golden-age American period of yesteryear.
Bad news: the bare-limbed look of that gingko tree tells you about the weather in DC as of early April. Also, sadly, the truck was not stopping right outside my house.
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James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the new book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which has been a New York Times best-seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.