<em>S-Town</em> Is a Well-Crafted Monument to Empathy

In the days after the 2016 election, an by David Wong on called “How Half of America Lost Its F**king Mind” went viral. It listed five reasons why the Donald Trump phenomenon was explicable not by red vs. blue but rural vs. urban, and it relied heavily on pop culture to make its case. “Every TV show is about L.A. or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in,” he wrote from downstate Illinois. “When they did make a show about us, we were jokes—either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (, and before that, ) or filthy murderous, and before that, ). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.”