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County Highway is a magazine about America in the form of a 19th-century newspaper, started
on a shoestring by three friends (David Samuels, Walter Kirn, and Ryan Baesemann) in the
wake of the pandemic. We’ve since become the fastest growing print periodical in the country
— earning an annual circulation of 150,000 copies barely one year after releasing our debut
issue.
The name County Highway is inspired by what we believe is the perfect-sized place for
the enhancement of life and art. A county is a chunk of earth big enough to allow for a variety
of human types, but small enough to get to know a decent number of your neighbors, where
they come from, what they’re proud of, what they fear, what they smoke, what they drink, and
what they love. The county where our newspaper is located is somewhere between all those
places, real and imaginary. It’s the scale of the place that’s important to us, and also the idea of
traveling from one to another with an eye towards finding new answers to the founding
American questions of who we are, and why we are here.
Dubbed “America’s Only Newspaper,” we feature hairy off-road adventures by some of
America's best and strangest writers; reports on the myriad of political and spiritual crises that are
gripping our country and their deeper cultural and historical sources; regular columns about
agriculture, civil liberties, animals, herbal medicine, and living off the grid, both mentally and
physically; essays about literature and art; and an entire section devoted to music. Offering a
road-side banquet of American humor, common-speech, and social and political insights in
every issue, we print six times each year for our readers across all fifty states and Canada. Our
pages have proven that wherever there’s a stop sign, there’s a story.

David Samuels is editor and co-founder of County Highway. He had a long career as a staff and
contract writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The
Point, and other magazines, on subjects including dog tracks, music festivals, blimp pilots, serial
impostors, jewel thieves, pigeon racing, and the art of bringing down large buildings with
explosives. He also reported on wars in the Balkans and the Middle East, where he learned the
importance of gun safety. He is currently restoring a gold 1985 Porsche 924 that he bought off a
guy who found it in a barn.

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Meaghan Garvey is a writer and illustrator living on the beach in the Midwest. She’s a
contributing writer to County Highway and Pitchfork, with bylines in NPR, The New YorkTimes, New York Magazine, Tablet, and Vulture, and many others. Her debut book Midwestern Death Trip will be out in 2026.

Jeff Weiss is a music writer and cultural critic whose work has appeared in County Highway,
The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, The FADER, and many other outlets.
A former columnist for LA Weekly, he is the cofounder of The LAnd magazine and the
founder of the pioneering hip-hop blog Passion of the Weiss, along with its record label,
POW Recordings. He lives in

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Join us to celebrate the release of Barbara Leff's new collection of poetry UNDERTOW