Summer’s Calling…
Featuring the new Y’all Street Issue, Scenic Tote Bag, and premium card deck and custom tuck box!
Magazine
Issue 129, Summer 2025
The Oxford American’s Summer 2025 Issue focuses on business and industry. Coined to describe Dallas’s booming financial sector, “Y’all Street” inspired our coverage of Southern industry: unique, fraught, promising, and ever-changing. “We’re borrowing the colloquial sobriquet to highlight the thriving, declining, and emerging economies throughout the South,” writes associate editor Frederick McKindra in the issue’s introductory essay.
Contributors include, among others: Michelle Orange, who reports on greyhound racing in West Virginia, the last state with active racetracks; Chris Pomorski, who talks with contract farmers working to nullify relationships with corporate poultry producers; and C. J. Bartunek, who explores land, love, and sacrifice in the inspiring story of the family-owned Moon’s Tree Farm.
THE Y’ALL STREET ISSUE
Introduction: Welcome to Y’all Street
On the tension between business and the humanities
By Frederick McKindra
Fraying Ties: How Louisiana’s Shrimpers Fight to Survive
Louisiana’s Shrimp and Petroleum Festival at eighty-nine
By Ned Randolph
Atomic No. 1: Inside Houston’s Contested Hydrogen Future
The promise and the pitfalls of the Gulf Coast’s bet on hydrogen
By Keaton Peters
The Delta-8 Blues: The THC Industry in Tennessee Faces Crisis
Hemp-derived cannabinoids got the South high—and now that is going to change
By Baynard Woods
The Tangled Past and Unsettled Future of Greyhound Racing in West Virginia
In the home of America’s last active tracks, tradition and uncertainty run neck and neck
By Michelle Orange
Inside the Dollar General Workers’ Fight for Safety and Fair Pay
These Louisianans are organizing to transform the stores their communities rely on
By Katie Jane Fernelius
The Costs of Eternity: Germany’s Post-Coal Prophecy for Appalachia
What can central Appalachia learn from the Ruhr’s transformation?
By Jarred Johnson
How Contract Poultry Farmers Are Transitioning to New, Profitable Ventures
Sustainable farming models offer an escape route for getting out of the chicken business
By Chris Pomorski
The Legacy of Rock Hill, SC’s Bleachery
How the Bleachery impacted labor, family, and the local community
By Darren E. Grem
At Moon’s Tree Farm, Innovation Is a Family Tradition
Inside a thriving family-owned tree nursery in Georgia
By C. J. Bartunek
ART & PHOTOGRAPHY BY: Zora J Murff, Selina Román, Marianna T. Olague, Rashid Johnson, Keaton Peters, Ben Pier, Clare Menck, glindsay65 via Flickr, Danial Ryan, Rita Harper, Dane Rhys, Francesco Casalbordino, Michael Northrup, Barbara Diener, Maxine Helfman, Sarah Anne Johnson, C. J. Bartunek
COVER: Two In The Hand, archival pigment print by Zora J Murff. Courtesy the artist