I'm happy to have a new article up and running at Science Progress, a branch of the Center for American Progress. The topic: the coming of the high-speed Internet to the width and breadth of Virginia. I'll give you a taste, if you promise to hop on over there and read the whole thing:

"Let me tell you how I decided to come live on the rural frontier," starts Joan Minor.

Minor is, improbably, the official blogger for Rose Hill, Va., a tiny mountain town tucked deep in Virginia's tobacco and coal-mining country, who came to live there because of the state's unique broadband policies. "You know the magazine Fast Company? They did this issue on people who work from all these bizarre locations -- like a monastery on an island somewhere," she explains with a hearty laugh. "What all those places had was a broadband hookup. And that was my inspiration."

Minor moved to her Appalachian oasis after catching word that high-speed Internet was on its way. As recently as two years ago, as Minor tells it, getting online to run her grant-writing business required actually meeting the Internet halfway. "I used to drive over the hills for 45 minutes to Duffield because that was the farthest point west the Internet went."

But while the federal government limps along with its fortune-cookie message of a broadband policy -- "The market will provide" -- in Virginia the global communications network is being pulled and cajoled into every corner of the state where Virginians want and need to get connected. This approach not only gives the state a much needed economic shot in the arm. It also demonstrates a realist approach to bringing broadband to Americans where they make their homes, giving them the tools to live the lives they want to lead.