The opening of a Venkat Rao post, in which he updates the country mouse-city mouse divide for our Digital Age:

“The fable of the town mouse and the country mouse is probably the oldest exploration of the tensions involved in urbanization, but it seems curiously dated today.  The tensions explored in the fable — the simple, rustic pleasures and securities of country life versus the varied, refined pleasures and fears of town life  – seem irrelevant today. In America at least, the ‘country’ such as it is, has turned into a geography occupied by industrial forces.  The countryside is a sparsely populated, mechanized food-and-resource cloud. A system of national parks, and a scattering of ‘charming’ small towns and villages pickled in nostalgia, are all that liven up a landscape otherwise swallowed up by automated modernity.

In America, larger provincial towns and cities that are just a little too large and unwieldy to be nostalgically pickled, but not large enough to be grown into metropolitan regions, appear to be mostly degenerating into meth-lab economies or ossifying into enclaves of a retreating rich.

So the entire canvas of the town mouse/country mouse fable is being gradually emptied out. If there is a divide today, it is between two new species of mice: metro mice and cloud mice.”

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Jerry Mouse leaves the sticks to visit Manhattan, 1945: