HOW I FOUND MYSELF IN THE MIDWEST

A native son abandons Silicon Valley to return to Minnesota.

Yes, it’s known as flyover country, the kind of place that invokes visions of cornfields and snowdrifts in the minds of the coastal elite. But having done a couple of decades at YouTube and Google, Grove found himself thinking that “being in the cradle of innovation was starting to feel oddly confining.” The trade-off for the fact that, as his wife notes, “it’s just so fucking cold here,” he found, was a high quality of life, with a lot more house for the money, low taxes, excellent schools, the works—but, he adds meaningfully, that has much to do with being white, for even as minorities (notably Somalians and Hmong) have moved to Minnesota in ever greater numbers, the “historically very white state” exhibits startling racial inequality and racially founded animus, a fact brought to the fore by the murder of George Floyd in 2020. At that critical moment, Grove recounts, he had weathered the Covid-19 crisis working in state government as an aide to Tim Walz with a special brief as liaison to the business community—which, of course, was rebelling against the lockdown. The Floyd case inspired Grove to branch out and establish a program to introduce young students of color to tech careers. As Grove writes, in time he was induced to leave public service for journalism, a public service of a different kind, for “if there’s one fabric that holds a community together, its quality information about what’s happening in it.” On that note, Grove closes by encouraging his readers to involve themselves more in local affairs and local government, concluding, “The institutions that bind us together aren’t broken, they just need new investment and ideas.”

A pleasingly civic-minded account of making a new home on familiar ground, and making it better.