Do you really intend to stand behind that Texas Monthly declaration, slathered all over their recent cover, that declares the fifty best barbecue joints in the world are all in Texas? You’re better than that, kind sir.

Stock your playlist with tunes from North Carolina's varied musical catalog—anything from the aforementioned Petey Pablo, to Superchunk, to James Taylor, depending on your tastes—and hit the road for some of the region's best barbecue, farm-fresh produce, and . . . jail food. (Be patient. We'll explain.)

A foodie road trip through the bluegrass state with the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Perhaps the appeal, to us twenty- and thirty-somethings going about life like it's one long home-ec class, is that georgic chores like composting food scraps or butchering pigs are just beyond our memory's reach, but not so far beyond it that we can't imagine them. The distance makes them perfect focal points in our digitized pastoral.

A new literary prize has been concocted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.