An Excerpt From Urbantasm, A Novel. Book One: The Dying City
Excerpted with permission from Urbantasm: The Dying City, available for purchase in September 2018. By Connor Coyne Adam’s dad’s latest place [...]
Why Do We Continue To Be Surprised By Gentrification?
Part of what many people find so irritating—or dangerous, depending on how much you have at stake—about upwardly mobile young people moving to working-class city neighborhoods is the sense of frivolity, of flightiness, they carry with them.
Too Fancy for Flint?
I live in Flint. I own a home in the city. However, I’m still often reluctant to call Flint my home. This isn’t because I’m not madly in love with this place, or incredibly proud to live in the city. It’s because of the way I talk. As soon as I open my mouth, most people realize I’m clearly not from here.
Pot Still Won’t Be Legal In Ohio For Awhile, But At The Cleveland School Of Cannabis Students Are Already Hitting The Books
The building is one of those beige, ’80s office numbers, and through the half-shut blinds, cars are whizzing past on Interstate 480. It’s a beautiful day in April, and in the darkened classroom, the teacher is doing a midterm review with the students, going through slides of vocabulary and textbook photos.
Main-Travelled Roads: Introduction
By Brianne Jaquette From Main-Travelled Roads, by Hamlin Garland, an inaugural title in Belt Publishing’s new Belt Revivals imprint, reprinting [...]
Michigan’s Primary Has Been Heralded As The Next Test For The “Blue Wave,” But What Does It Mean For Muslims In Michigan?
“Everybody let’s imagine something together. This can be our great moment. It’s nine days from now, Aug 7. Election night. There are headlines all around the world. We see them on CNN, on MSNBC, even on Fox News. “And what are we going to see?”
LeBron’s Legacy: The King Hits The Road (Again) But This Time He’s Leaving A Bit Of Himself Behind
The first time LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers, the NBA team that plays just forty miles up the road from his hometown of Akron, he was savaged as “callous,” “heartless,” and “cowardly.” And that’s just what team owner Dan Gilbert called him in an angry open letter ...
Democratizing Cleveland: An Introduction
For a decade between the mid-1970s and 1980s, the neighborhoods of Cleveland, Ohio hosted a vibrant community organizing movement. This movement put a pro-neighborhood agenda on center stage in a city that was the very definition of the term “urban crisis”.
The Pennsylvania I Carry With Me: An excerpt from “Red State Blues: Stories from Midwestern Life on the Left”
Five years after I left, I got Pennsylvania inked into my skin. It was my second autumn post-college, and the notion that I might never live in my home state again was sinking in. So I decided to carry the state outline on my left shoulder, with the major rivers of the western third, where I grew up, drawn in blue.
Bessie: The Lake Erie Monster
If you live in Northeast Ohio, you’ve probably heard of Bessie, the Lake Erie Monster. You may have drunk an IPA called Lake Erie Monster, which is produced by the Great Lakes Brewing Co. of Cleveland. Or you may have watched the Lake Erie Monsters, a minor league hockey team that plays in Quicken Loans Arena. But have you ever seen the Lake Erie Monster in real life?
55 Strong: In Conclusion
We all remember our favorite teachers. We tuck their small acts of kindness away in basements or in attic boxes: red-penned lines of encouragement, our worth acknowledged. We remember their handwriting and the wooden, waxy smell of their classrooms. Many of us continue to do good work in their names, and this is especially true of individuals who later became teachers themselves.
Dispatches From A Superlative Midwestern City
Milwaukee has become a clickbait darling. Our local media outlets run a story every time we're recognized as a "best-kept secret" or a "worst place to live." Without fail, my neighbors light up on Facebook in response to each one, sharing the latest listicle as they either swell with pride ("yeah, we are a hidden gem!") or struggle to articulate dissent with whoever most recently announced that we live in one of the country's most dangerous cities.