American Glossary – County Highway

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America by the Numbers

By The Editors

15,400,000,000 — American spending on sports tickets in 2023 (in USD) 16,400,000,000 — American spending on Ticketmaster fees in 2025 (in USD) 109,000,000,000 — American spending last year on lottery tickets in 2025 (in USD) 9.4 — Percentage decrease of visitors to Las Vegas since 2019 1300 — Percentage increase in online sports betting in the US since 2019 12,500,000,000 — Disposable face masks sold globally in 2019 124,000,000,000 — Disposable face masks sold globally in 2025 170,000,000 — Value of a “monster jade rock” discovered in Myanmar during 2016 (in USD) 71,200,000 — Price of the CTF Pink Star, the most valuable diamond ever sold at auction (in USD) 40 — Mice deaths per acre of cultivated grain 3.5 — Acres required to feed a varied diet to a family of four, including eggs, milk, and meat 40 — Acres of land to be granted to freed Southern slaves under Special Field Order No. 15, issued by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865 160 — Acres of surveyed …

Profile

Billy the Kid, With Chaser

Six cigarettes in the ashtray next to a Frank Stanford biography

The dirty realism of Wes Tirey

Alt Country enters its Cormac McCarthy phase

By James McWilliams

Wes Tirey is a cowpunk troubadour from the Midwest. An Ohio native, he rode the hillbilly highway in reverse, crafting gorgeous and haunting songs on his way to Asheville, North Carolina, where he now lives. Tirey is 39, wiry and taut, gray-grizzled a bit beyond his years. “Hard living,” he explained, ramming a cigarette into an ashtray. Tirey reached out to me last summer to discuss literature. I’d recently published a biography of Frank Stanford, the charismatic and troubled Ozarkian poet with a fierce cult of acolytes, a man dead by suicide at 29. Tirey admired Stanford’s backcountry patois, his violence, and his all-or-nothing obsession with craft. In a request that revealed Tirey’s own aesthetic philosophy, he asked me to share some unpublished Stanford poems — scribbles, drafts, outtakes, maybe a drunken ramble or two. He wanted something of Stanford’s that existed as far from completion as possible — some afterbirth of the initial poetic impulse. I obliged. I suppose the …