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Essays2025-09-26T13:07:04-04:00

Essays

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Terranexus in the Rust Belt

By |February 6, 2025|Essays|

If we are going to care about the environment and preserve natural spaces in the so-called “rust belt,” then we must love rust. We must practice terranexus and accept and even love the chaotic intersection of civilized and natural worlds.

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Turtle Lake

By |January 27, 2025|Essays|

Those who did it from a distance erased the people’s language. Once they could claim their fiction of terra nullius they flooded in close and put up fences. They erased the history of their conquest and they erased the lake’s history too.

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Martin Luther King in Dayton

By |January 20, 2025|Essays|

Although the irony is not lost on us that the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday falls on the forty-seventh presidential inauguration, EbonNia and Black Palette Art Gallery provide beacons of communal light and hope.... We must remain a kind, resilient people who are not afraid to be vocal and broadcast empathy. We are never too old to learn and embrace new information.

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Slap Shot in Flood City

By |January 16, 2025|Essays|

Slap Shot — the rare sports comedy about capitalism's transition from Fordism to FIRE industries! — doesn’t give a shit about winning.

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Homesteading in Soulard, St. Louis

By |January 13, 2025|Essays|

Soulard today is seen as one of St. Louis’s most vibrant neighborhoods. It has gained residents while the city’s population has fallen. However, it remains the exception to how the city pursues redevelopment.

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Living the Tiny Cabin Life

By |January 9, 2025|Essays|

The cabin guidelines ask you to be courteous and not too loud for your neighbors. No one near us was loud, even though most of the cabins appeared to be occupied. There are rules about too many people gathering at one site, to deter parties. This wouldn’t be the place to bring a big group and play drinking games.

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Fighting the Klan in Ohio, 1924

By |October 31, 2024|Essays|

At 6:30 a.m. Saturday, a crowd estimated at 1,700 gathered for Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the Catholic church established by Italian immigrants 18 years earlier. By 10:30 a.m., the Knights of the Flaming Circle started gathering in a park at North Main and Federal streets in Niles, across the street from General Electric. They were armed to the teeth and setting up blockades to keep the parade from happening. “We’ll meet the Klansmen as they arrive,” one Knight of the Flaming Circle told a reporter from the Youngstown Vindicator.

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On Picking Apples in the Lower Midwest

By |October 14, 2024|Essays|

Supposedly, it all started with an apple. In the beginning was the garden, the serpent, the woman—and “those fair apples,” as Milton writes in Paradise Lost. That was the beginning, or perhaps the beginning of the end.

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