Chesterton Prescribes Sanity

Last December, in a crystalline “polar vortex,” my husband and I drove to Florida after getting married in Ohio. As we drove along Interstate 75, we remarked on an increasingly common observation: Each town along the highway seemed interchangeable with the last. Starbucks, McDonald’s, Subway, sometimes a Walmart—and then the same businesses repeated one town later. And even those businesses themselves had been stripped of any individuality or quirk. No campy Ronald McDonald statue waving maniacally. No bright red Pizza Huts, the kind that have become internet shorthand for a kitschier, more whimsical version of America. Just sleek box stores in drab “millennial gray.”