Pull My Frank — Francis Arthur Norton IV

DISPATCHES

A winding road through the Carolina piedmont at dusk

Frank Norton / Chatham County

The Economist Got It Wrong Again, But So Did My Uncle Leroy

By Francis Arthur Norton IV March 14, 2026

There's a particular brand of confidence that comes from reading The Economist cover to cover and another, entirely different strain, that comes from having survived sixty years in Chatham County. Both are insufferable. Both are occasionally right. The trick is knowing when you're dealing with which.

Last Tuesday the magazine ran twelve pages on the fragility of Southeast Asian supply chains. My uncle Leroy, who has never left the state of North Carolina except for one ill-advised trip to Myrtle Beach in 1987, told me the same thing over biscuits. "Everything's connected," he said, tapping the table for emphasis. "You pull one thread and the whole damn sweater comes apart." He was talking about his marriage, but the principle holds.

The global economy runs on two things, according to the people who study it: trust and the collective agreement to pretend that numbers on screens are real. In Chatham County, it runs on handshakes and the unspoken understanding that we don't talk about what happened at the church picnic in '94. The parallels are more instructive than any of us are comfortable admitting.

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The Labyrinth

Borges wrote about infinite libraries. I found one once, in a barn outside Pittsboro. Every shelf — and there were shelves, proper ones, built from tobacco sticks — was full of Farmers' Almanacs going back to 1847. The old man who owned them said he was "still checking their work."

He died in 2014. His nephew sold the barn to a couple from Raleigh who turned it into a yoga studio. The almanacs went to the landfill. An infinite library, reduced to nothing, in exactly the way Borges would have predicted.

My neighbor keeps a map of Chatham County from 1923 on his wall. Half the roads don't exist anymore. Half the ones we drive on now aren't on it. He says the map is more accurate than the GPS. "It shows where things should be," he says. Borges would have understood.

SNAPSHOTS

Main Street at dawn — Main Street, 6am. Nobody here but me and the truth.

An old storefront — They say a picture's worth a thousand words. This one's worth about three: "Lord have mercy."

Buenos Aires street scene — Buenos Aires, 1987. Looking for Borges's ghost. Found a good empanada instead.

The old courthouse. Still standing. Still judging.

Tobacco field at sunset — Tobacco doesn't grow here like it used to. Neither do the stories. But both leave a stain.

HOME DIRT

Roundabout Theology

March 12, 2026

They're putting a roundabout in on 64 and folks are treating it like the county decided to worship Saturn. Driving in circles, they say. We've been doing that our whole lives — now we just have a concrete island to prove it.

The Last Good Barbershop

March 8, 2026

Three chairs. No appointments. A television tuned permanently to a channel that doesn't exist anymore — just static and the occasional ghost of The Andy Griffith Show. Harold doesn't believe in walk-ins. "You're either here or you're not," he says. Philosophy from a man with scissors.

What the Kudzu Knows

March 3, 2026

It grows about a foot a day, swallowing barns, fence posts, and the occasional Oldsmobile. The botanists call it invasive. My grandmother called it ambitious. "That vine," she used to say, "has more direction than any man I ever married." She married three.

MORE DISPATCHES

Letters from a Reluctant Globalist

March 10, 2026

I've been to forty-seven countries and the thing I've learned is that everywhere has a version of my neighbor Clyde — a man who knows everything about nothing and won't shut up about either. The accent changes. The confidence doesn't.

What Davos Could Learn from the Siler City Flea Market

March 5, 2026

At the World Economic Forum they talk about "stakeholder capitalism" like they invented caring about your neighbor. At the Siler City flea market, Miss Delores has been practicing it since 1978 — she just calls it "not being an ass." The keynote would be shorter, too.

The Currency of Nonsense

February 28, 2026

The Economist devoted four pages to cryptocurrency this week. My mechanic, who has grease under his fingernails and no opinion about blockchain, asked me a better question: "If you can't hold it, is it real?" Descartes in coveralls.

FRANK TALK

"Every small town in North Carolina has a man who knows everything. He's usually wrong, but he's never boring. I should know. I am that man in at least three towns."

"The difference between wisdom and a bumper sticker is about twenty years and a bad marriage."

"My barber in Siler City makes more sense than the entire New York Times editorial board. And he charges less for the haircut."

"I read somewhere that Americans trust journalists less than they trust used car salesmen. In Chatham County, that's always been the case. But the car salesman never pretended to be objective."

"They say travel broadens the mind. After forty-seven countries I can confirm: it mostly broadens the waistline and the credit card bill. The mind was already broad enough — it just needed a window seat."

"The problem with reading The Economist is you start thinking in graphs. The problem with living in Chatham County is you start thinking in stories. I recommend the stories. The graphs lie more often."