I’m Jessica, and I’m riding my bike across the U.S.
This Substack is my notepad of sorts—the front-row seat to my journey through 500-person towns, winding mountain roads, and all the people I’m meeting and interviewing along the way.
After writing about the tech industry for the last several years at Fortune Magazine, I’ve decided to take my reporter’s notebook to the open road for a couple of months and write about the 250th anniversary of the United States. I’m going to be interviewing people I meet along the way about what it means to be an American today in 2026, about the evolving American dream, and about where people believe things are headed next. I want to get to know people from the various communities across America and find out what’s misunderstood about them.
In an age where funding for local journalism keeps drying up, it feels more important than ever that journalists are intentional about keeping rural communities part of the conversation—that reporters like me take time to visit people where they are, to learn about the places they live, to understand what matters to them most, to ask them what they think. I also think it’s important that people get to know and meet reporters who are writing the news they read, and that we make efforts to try to rebuild any trust that may have been broken somewhere along the way.
If you’re interested in any of the above, then tag along with me on my journey for the next 2.5 months by subscribing below or check out the archives. See you on the road!
About the journalist
This is me, Jessica Mathews, stopping for a coffee last year on a cycling trip.
Until embarking on this cross-country trip, I was a senior reporter at Fortune Magazine, where I investigated safety and environmental issues at Elon Musk’s tunneling startup, the Boring Company, and closely followed incidents and safety episodes within the self-driving car and electric vehicle industries. Here is my website if you’d like to read some of my feature stories and investigations, and here is my LinkedIn if you’d like to check out my background.
More recently, I’ve become obsessed with documenting the ways in which technology and big business are reshaping rural America. I hope to get a first-hand look at how some of that is playing out along my route.
