Welcome to Utopia?

For those of us who grew up in and around big cities, the idea of small town America is often alien and perplexing. Yet, if we scratch beneath the surface there a poignancy in looking at places still untouched by the ethos of popular culture. Such a place is Utopia, Texas. A town ninety miles west of San Antonio, it has no movie theaters or bookstore and only recently has it gotten internet and cable television. Entertainment Weekly senior writer Karen Valby in her new book Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town takes us deep inside this place of cowboys and farmers and shows us what happens when the old tensions of small-town life confront a new reality of creative destruction. My conversation with Karen Valby: