“What’s the matter with Kansas?” asked Emporia newspaperman William Allen White (long before Thomas Frank used it for the title of his 2004 book). Others call our state “Flyover Country” or complain about the monotony of driving across the state to reach Colorado if heading west (though I’m not sure I’ve ever heard people talk about it taking so long to reach Missouri if they’re eastward bound). And even though we don’t lead the nation in the number of tornadoes each year (that was Mississippi in 2022) we still hear all the Dorothy jokes and the “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore” line.