Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning

When Alan Maimon got the assignment in 2000 to report on life in rural Eastern Kentucky, his editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal told him to cover the region "like a foreign correspondent would."



And indeed, when Maimon arrived in Hazard, Kentucky, fresh off a reporting stint for the New York Times's Berlin bureau, he felt every bit the outsider. He had landed in a place in the vice grip of ecological devastation and a corporate-made opioid epidemic-a place where vote-buying and drug-mo...