small towns

Using pandemic recovery money distributed by the European Union, Italy is trying to bring back one dying village in each of the country's 21 regions. The villages will each get $20 million.

Most remote towns are shrinking, whether they like it or not. But if they take inspiration from industrial Eastern Europe after the Cold War, they can improve even as they get smaller.

Journalist Ted Genoways spent a year on a small farm in rural Nebraska, and he says American nostalgia for the family farm overlooks the pressures farmers face and the realities of food production.