To Catch a Craw
While scientifically correct, few West Virginians call them crayfish. Unless you’ve got a PhD, calling them crayfish around here marks you as someone out of place.
Collegiate Gothic
“I’m hoping for a good turnout at the conference. That might help our case. Some national recognition wouldn’t hurt. Maybe we could find someone to cover the conference in Philosophy Now? I also have a few other ideas, but we need a refill first.” Harvey stood. “You want another beer?”
The Detroit Lions’ Last Hurrah
It isn’t the last time Bill Ford will celebrate a little too much after a Detroit Lions’ game. But it is the last time in his long life he will celebrate them winning a championship.
The Pittsburgh School
Yet part of what defines the Pittsburgh School, from Brackenridge onward, is the mystical kernel of something beyond mere matter that animates any consideration of this place: the transcendent in the prosaic, the sacred in the profane. An intimation of beauty amid a kingdom of ugliness.
No Son of Mine
I didn’t say, as they told me how they owned a boat and spent much of their summer cruising Maine’s coastline, that my mother’s biggest dream was to get out of West Virginia, that her biggest love was the ocean, that she hoped to die listening to the sounds of the waves.
Queering Appalachian Agriculture
Kent follows the pattern of Rust Belt city decline with recovery, including a focus on sustainability. Edible Kent fits in the framework of moving toward sustainability while also addressing economic needs for low-income folks, while the city’s economic recovery and development strategy has been so focused on gentrification that one could call its view of sustainability anti-poor.
Botticelli in the Burgh
All of these paintings, the originals in Tuscany, are also viewable down to the most granular detail, by the most strict parameters of verisimilitude, in an Italianate building of white granite and red terra cotta roof in the middle of Pittsburgh.
Reading “The Goophered Grapevine” on the Farm
Charles W. Chesnutt was a serial transplant. He found the ancestral North Carolina inhospitable. And in the North--Washington, New York, Cleveland, he was always homesick, from his earliest departures.
The Paper Companies
I surveyed all of these plausible arguments and wondered how I might prevent the paper companies from turning them into a sea of obfuscation stretching out in every direction as far as anyone could see.
Chicago Dream Houses
How a Mid-Century Architecture Competition Reimagined the American Home
Crossroads of Desire
On Black and White Indiana During the Great Migration
To Be Marquette
“If you lived up here, you’d know what it was. It’s all anyone talks about. You’re either for it: it’s going to create jobs. Or you’re against it: it’s bad for the environment. No one’s neutral.”