In the wee hours of the morning on a cold January day in 2002, a train carrying anhydrous ammonia, commonly used as a fertilizer, derailed near the town of Minot, North Dakota. Hanging in the air was a dense cloud of hazardous gas, but when residents turned on their radios to find out what was happening, there was no emergency alert system (EAS) warning. What Minot residents heard instead was a syndicated program that was also heard in New York City at the same time.

It’s hard to believe that something like this could happen again, but it could. The concern has shifted from fertilizer to flammable crude oil from the Bakken formation in western North Dakota. In December of 2013, a train hauling Bakken oil crashed into a derailed train and caused a mushroom cloud explosion near Casselton, ND. In April 2014, another train transporting Bakken oil derailed in downtown Lynchburg, Virginia, resulting in oil spilling into the nearby James River. But the most dramatic train accident involving Bakken oil happened in July 2013 in Lac Mégantic, Quebec, and tragically killed 47 people. What would happen if a train exploded in places such as Fargo or the Twin Cities? Would the people in these cities hear about it right away or would there be a delay like in Minot all those years ago?

As in 2002, one of the problems now, at least where the media are concerned, is absent owners who operate their stations from a distance. The consolidation of radio ownership in the largely rural state of North Dakota is especially acute. The center of the North Dakota oil boom is the town of Williston, where KEYZ-AM has long been a mainstay in the community. But contrary to popular belief, the station is not locally owned. According to the Federal Communications Commission’s ownership reports, which go back until 2001 for their electronic copies, KEYZ is owned by Arlington Capital Partners (Washington, D.C.) and is operated by its radio ownership subsidiary Cherry Creek Radio (Denver, Colorado). KEYZ flipped format from a country music station/farm radio to talk radio. The reason cited for the flip was the change in the type of economy in the area, from agricultural to oil-driven.

In Fargo, ND, the state’s largest city, the two competing radio station groups swapped radio station ownership with each other not once, but twice. The first time, in 1999, the purpose was to maintain balance in the market. The second time, in 2013, one local owner wanted to retain ownership of a particular radio station. The same owner sold one station group and purchased the competitor within a year. One reason the swap took place was that there was a distant owner involved who looked at the market solely from a business standpoint.

Both of these cases of ownership are symptomatic of the problems with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The passage of the Act lowered the standards broadcasters must meet when applying for and renewing their licenses, with a lot hanging on the ever-vague PICON standard. Radio is being treated as a business first and a public resource second – if that – more than ever before. With an increasing number of absentee owners there is little incentive to provide local news coverage of disasters – both natural and manmade – other than broadcasting an EAS. But even then there is proof that the EAS can fail people that are dependent of up-to-date information. When did making a profit become more important then public safety?

There is a need to study the dynamics of small, local, rural markets because little is known about them. As scholars, we have neglected them and focused on big markets. But there are more markets like Fargo (ranked number 204 by Nielsen Audio) than ones like New York City (ranked number 1). Fargo’s proximity to the Bakken oil fields makes the prospect of exploding trains even more real, but there is a greater concern. These trains are traveling throughout the US and Canada. Cities close to the railroad tracks are in danger of a train derailment that could be transporting hazardous materials. Regardless of the size of market, there still is a need to have access to radio’s EAS in times of disaster. Exploding trains are not the only risk we run, but they are a dramatic reminder that we need to study small radio markets because they show the flaws of current radio regulation.

Until recently, I would have to explain that Marilyn Hagerty writes restaurant reviews for the Grand Forks Herald. But not after what Anthony Bourdain calls “her infamously guileless Olive Garden review” a year ago last March. The review went viral when people elsewhere used it to congratulate themselves for having more sophisticated tastes or, in a second wave of comments, took offense that such earnestness would earn this salt-of-the-earth writer such scorn.

Now Hagerty has published Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews, whose title is pretty self-explanatory. I went to the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks as an undergraduate, and I’m faculty now. Reading her book was like visiting old haunts, many of them long gone.

Watching Hagerty go viral was a strange experience for people in Grand Forks—our town isn’t home to a lot of celebrities. What made it especially surreal was seeing ourselves reflected in the fun-house mirror of blog posts and news articles by people who have never been here but were sure they knew all about about us. Both reactions—the self-congratulatory and the offended on Hagerty’s behalf—seemed to come from the assumption that we’re earnest people immune to the irony that pervades the post-modern cosmopolitan world of the coasts. We’re simple and therefore worthy of disdain or admiration, or some combination. Or, as Anthony Bourdain writes in his preface to Grand Forks:

This is a straightforward account of what people have been eating—still are eating—in much of America. As related by a kind, good-hearted reporter looking to pass along as much useful information as she can—while hurting no one … This book kills snark dead. (p. ix–x)

In other words, what was striking was the claim, made at a distance, about what it means to be here. And by “here” I mean where I am sitting, in my house facing 3rd Street, just north of downtown. Bourdain’s observation is a symptom of a nostalgia for a simpler time, one that—from his perch in New York City—appears to exist here. The distance from there to here is one of time as well as space:

Grand Forks is not New York City. We forget that—until we read her earlier reviews and remember, some of us, when you’d find a sloppy joe, steak Diane, turkey noodle soup, three-bean salad, red Jell-O in our neighborhoods … A prehipster world where lefse, potato dumplings, and walleye were far more likely to appear on a menu than pork belly. (p. viii–ix)

So what does it mean to “kill snark dead”? Snark is what we get when we try through sarcasm to negate what other people say. We pull their rhetorical rug out from under them, so to speak, but in the most cynical way—we know they’re wrong, but we can’t come up with something better ourselves. The truth is, we have no rug, either. It’s a symptom of the post-modern cosmopolitanism of the coasts (which are no longer “prehipster”), or so I’m led to believe.

Marilyn Hagerty does not do snark. On the contrary, she admonishes her readers:

To me, it’s embarrassing when companions make noisy complaints in restaurants. In fact, I avoid complaining even when asked by the waitress if everything is OK. I usually just nod my head and say everything is fine.

But one of my friends tells me, “You are wrong.” She maintains that it helps the restaurant when you let them know what you don’t like.

OK. I’ll concede you should let them know. But I think you should do it politely. (p. 5)

But this doesn’t mean Marilyn Hagerty is simple or naive. Far from it. By Bourdain’s account,

In person, she has a flinty, dry, very sharp sense of humor. She misses nothing.

I would not want to play poker with her for money. (p. ix)

The few times I have met her, I’ve been left with the same impression. What people missed when they read her Olive Garden review is that her humor—what we might read as a refined sense of irony, even if she wouldn’t call it that—shows up in her reviews, if you know where to look. Her irony doesn’t take the form of snark, but it isn’t the simple earnestness for which Bourdain is nostalgic, either. It’s flattering for a town like Grand Forks to be noticed by people like Bourdain, but to the degree that their recognition of the town flattens out the experience of living here, it misses the point.

This is the view from my front yard. It’s not always so dramatic.

So what’s it like to live here? I can speak only from personal experience, but I don’t think I’m terribly different from other people here. I’m aware of what’s happening elsewhere. I travel there often. The fabric of the world beyond Grand Forks is woven into the fabric of Grand Forks, too, and it’s the tug between there and here that gives texture to the micro-structure of feeling (if I may abuse Raymond Williams’s useful term) that characterizes life here. Hagerty is aware of this, too. She travels. She takes the same approach to reviewing New York’s Le Bernardin as she does to reviewing the Grand Forks Olive Garden. The effect is funny and suggests there’s more to her approach than she’s letting on. Her humor is even clearer in the notes that accompany her reprinted reviews in Grand Forks. After her reviews, a quick note appears: “Topper’s succumbed to a fire and the site is now home to a bank” or “Starlite was evicted from the Grand Cities Mall in August 2002 for nonpayment of its rent” or “Mexican Village continues to operate in Grand Forks.” After her review of Le Bernadin, she adds, “Le Bernardin continues to operate in New York.”

(By the way, if you’re ever in Grand Forks, I recommend Rhombus Guys Pizza and, if your timing is right, the Saturday night dinners at Amazing Grains. I cooked for the Amazing Grains dinner once, and Marilyn Hagerty mentioned me in a column.)