Town Hall Seattle: Civics Series
Town Hall’s Civics series highlights everything from local policies to world politics. These events offer perspectives on a range of topics as diverse as Seattle itself—a bustling forum for activism, discovery, and thought-provoking discussion.
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Sep 11, 2018
With an account equal parts dark, surreal, and humorous, journalist Maya Rao brought us a fraught firsthand chronicle of the breakneck capitalist microcosm contained in the modern-day gold rush of North Dakota’s oil fields. Rao took Town Hall’s stage to share accounts from her book Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier, detailing her interactions with drifters, fortune-seekers, and unlucky entrepreneurs who embodied the region’s culture of reckless greed. Listen in with Rao for a sobering look at the faltering landscape of an oil frontier boom town—and the unlikely pioneers who flocked to the region to reckon their legacy.
Maya Rao is a staff writer in the Washington D.C. bureau of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Awl, Philadelphia Inquirer, Longreads, and more.
Recorded live at The Collective by Town Hall Seattle on Thursday, September 6, 2018.