After she had taught Alina and her classmates for several years, Marilyn was fired, supposedly for “brainwashing” her students, Alina told me. Alina still seems bitter about it—she instantly jumped to Marilyn’s defense during our Skype call—and it hardened Alina’s resolve to leave Russia as soon as she could.

Right after graduation, Alina took the entrance exam to study in Finland. It was what she considered to be a looser, more liberal nation, where education also happens to be free—and where more people agree with Alina’s views. She’s now a student at a university in Lappeenranta, a Finnish town not far from the Russian border.

For Alina, having weird beliefs was just too distressing. “For me, you either stay and try to change the society,” she explained, “or you just move out and you go to a country that’s more accepting and where you’re going to fit in.” No doubt many other loose people living in tight cultures—or vice versa—would feel the same way.

Beverly, Part I

It was when she began her job as a sociology professor at a small research university in Texas that Beverly Stiles had her weirdness realization: she was informed by some of her students that she was “the liberal one.” And she, meanwhile, was shocked by how conservative her surroundings were. The combination of where Beverly was teaching and her particular research focus sharpened the differences between her and her neighbors.

Beverly’s university, Midwestern State, is, officially, in the most Republican place in America. The Cook Political Report’s “Partisan Voting Index” measures how far each congressional district leans to the left or right. The most Democratic congressional district is in the Bronx, in New York, with an index of D+44—meaning69 it votes Democratic by 44 percentage points more than the country as a whole.

The most Republican, as of this writing, is Texas’s 13th district, at R+33. Texas’s 13th encompasses a northern, barren stretch of the Lone Star state—the panhandle plus the top rim of the pan. The district gallops around Dallas, dances with Oklahoma along the jagged border, and swallows up a 105,000-person town called Wichita Falls.

The place was never exactly the crown jewel of Texas, even according to its native sons. Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry once had a character call Wichita Falls70 “the ugliest place on earth.” In the late seventies, Texas Monthly ranked71 “full-time resident of Wichita Falls” sixth on its list of “worst jobs in Texas,” after handling dead animals.

Still, Wichita Falls has always been big enough to matter. As the writer William Hauptman, also a native, described in a 1988 New York Times Magazine story, the area’s oil industry made it the inspiration for Boom Town, a 1940 film starring Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, and it was, perhaps out of broiling necessity, the site of the first hotel in the country that had air-conditioning.