I arrived in America curious about everything.
This is the correct attitude for a new arrival, and I commend it. The curiosity was genuine and functional—it was the method by which I learned how the country operated beneath its official descriptions. I asked questions. I observed. I built models, tested them and revised them. Curiosity was the tool.
What I did not expect was what the country would do to the tool over time.
In my experience, America did not suppress curiosity. It did something more interesting: it redirected it. The country offered such a large and varied surface of things to investigate—its history, contradictions, popular culture, political theatre, geography, institutions and human achievement—that curiosity could remain fully occupied without turning toward the structural questions that might make it uncomfortable.
Two kinds of curiosity
I have spent time in both modes, and I know the difference from the inside. The first—curiosity directed at the surface—is pleasurable and sustainable and produces a great deal of knowledge. Over the years I accumulated more American history, music, political machinery and regional culture than I had expected to know. This was the product of genuine curiosity aimed at a very large target.
The second mode turns toward structural questions: how the surface is produced and maintained, who benefits from it and who bears its costs. It produces different knowledge. A museum’s act of acknowledgment and the absence of material adjustment outside it can belong to the same system. Individual warmth and social clustering can coexist, not as contradictions but as complements. The legibility of the franchise and the erosion of regional distinctiveness can emerge from the same economic arrangement. Formal law and unnamed hierarchy can both shape the same country.
What I have decided, after roughly fifteen years, is that the most important thing curiosity can do is remain uncomfortable.
Comfortable curiosity—the kind that finds wonderful things and stops there—is available to everyone and produces, in the end, a well-informed affection. Uncomfortable curiosity—the kind that follows an observation past the point where it flatters the system that produced it—is harder to sustain. It produces something more useful: a relationship with the country that can hold appreciation and critique in the same breath, without requiring either to cancel the other.
I arrived with the comfortable kind. Over time, the country gave me the uncomfortable kind—not by being bad to me, but by being exactly what it is: large and complex enough that a long-term observer with a functioning curiosity cannot help but end up here.
The gap
I am still curious. About all of it. The Shenandoah trail I have not yet walked. The states I have not driven through. The American conversations I have not yet had access to hear.
What I am curious about differently now is the gap: the space between what the country says about itself and what it does; between acknowledgment and adjustment; between the warmth of the individual and the coldness of the system.
Roughly fifteen years of watching. I expect to need another fifteen to understand what I have seen.
The curiosity is intact. That is the most important thing I can report.
The observations behind these notes date from June 2011 through 2026. I began writing them down in 2026. The gap is not an absence—it is the difference between experiencing something and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.