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For the fifth installment of our Strong Towns Podcast Greatest Hits series, we revisit a 2017 conversation between Strong Towns podcast host Chuck Marohn and acclaimed writer and photographer Chris Arnade.\nArnade has a history that makes him unusually well-positioned to see things from multiple angles. His life has taken him from a small town in Florida, to a PhD in particle physics, to 20 years as a Wall Street bond trader, to producing a powerful series of photographic essays for The Guardian on the toll of addiction and social disintegration in America\u2019s small towns and big cities alike.\nIn 2011, disenchanted with the Wall Street life and looking for a change, Arnade began taking a lot of long walks around his adopted city of New York. But with a catch: he made a point of walking around all the neighborhoods they tell you not to go to\u2014\u201cbecause they\u2019re too dangerous, or because I\u2019m too white.\u201d Arnade talked with whoever would talk with him, and listened to their life stories. He found something the media, even the liberal media, rarely discuss: \u201cThere was a lot of dignity, a lot of community. These neighborhoods weren\u2019t wastelands, and they were filled with people doing their best to struggle against a system that was stacked against them.\u201d\nAs a non-journalist, Arnade was able to break a cardinal rule of journalism: don\u2019t get involved. He made friends with addicts and homeless people, helped them out with cash when needed, went to court hearings with them, gave them rides, and learned a lot about an America that is invisible to many of us.\nStrong Towns\u2019s Chuck Marohn was prompted to interview Arnade after reading a Medium piece on Cairo, Illinois. (Arnade\u2019s original piece appears to have been deleted.) Cairo, located on a narrow peninsula of solid ground where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers converge, has endured decades of steep decline. Home to about 2,000 people, mostly African-American and mostly poor, very little industry remains in the city, and the historic downtown is so empty that, Arnade says, on his visit there he couldn\u2019t find a place to use the restroom.\nAs a planner and engineer, Marohn, upon viewing photos of Cairo\u2019s desolation, was taken by the town\u2019s legacy of failed experiments to bring back the prosperity it had lost\u2014such as the striking visual of an ornate \u201cHistoric Downtown Cairo\u201d arch framing a street of boarded up shops. Arnade, on the other hand, helps us understand the sociology of a place like Cairo, Illinois, or Portsmouth, Ohio, or Hunts Point in the Bronx.\nIn this conversation, Marohn and Arnade discuss how the longer-term consequences of the loss of a locally self-sustaining economy are often more severe than the easily quantified short-term ones. They\u2019re the human toll of overdoses and suicides. To an economist, economic consolidation can look like a thousand jobs lost here, a thousand jobs gained there, and a percentage point of GDP on a spreadsheet. But to a town that has lost its major employer, Arnade says, \u201cThey hadn\u2019t just lost the factory. Once the factory was gone, they lost all forms of community and all forms of meaning. Then the churches started falling apart. Then the families started falling apart.\u201d\nMarohn and Arnade discuss the alienation that results from economic dislocation, and how conventional prescriptions fall short as an answer:\n\nHow anomie\u2014the feeling of not being a meaningful part of anything bigger than yourself fuels America\u2019s epidemic of addiction and suicide\n\n\nWhy \u201ceducation is the solution\u201d doesn\u2019t always work\n\n\nWhy people don\u2019t leave struggling towns for opportunity elsewhere, and sometimes shouldn\u2019t\n\n\nHow society\u2019s \u201cfront-row kids\u201d and \u201cback-row kids\u201d fail to understand each other\n\n\nHow small-town, provincial society can be exclusionary and judgmental\u2014but so can elite, educated society