By A.M. Bilancini 

After a year of positive sports news and the RNC, is there an uptick in groups holding their business meetings in Cleveland? Via The Plain Dealer:

“The city is seeing a rush of business conferences and sales seminars, the kind of work-and-play gatherings that once landed elsewhere. It’s what happens when your town is suddenly the object of positive news and widespread intrigue … The RNC began a bonfire of positive publicity further fanned by the Return of LeBron, the Gay Games, Johnny Manziel mania and news of a downtown renaissance.”

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Does the Browns’ starting quarterback always serve as a symbol of Cleveland’s self-image? It’s meta, via ESPN:

“There has always been a deep connection between the way this town sees itself and the characteristics of its quarterback, from regal Otto Graham, who led the team to 10 straight championship games (winning seven) during Cleveland’s heyday from 1946 to 1955, to scrappy, overachieving Brian Sipe and his Kardiac Kids of 1980, to the Rust Belt fatalism of Bernie Kosar. And now, the choice between hometown kid Hoyer and media superstar Manziel has grown to signify much more than just touchdowns or wins. The choice to lead the Browns has become a cultural capstone on Cleveland’s rebirth.”

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Pittsburgh, city of single men with jobs. They’re probably working for the Pittsburgh Google office. 

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Meanwhile, Pittsburgh reexamines residency requirements for their police force, via FiveThirtyEight. (NB: See the chart of cities and the representativeness of their forces):

“[Twenty-five] percent of city residents are black, but only 12 percent of the police force is, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis … Pittsburgh is far from an outlier — a look at the demographic data of 75 cities and their police forces reveals it’s as average as it gets. Although it’s impossible to establish causation between requiring cops to live in the city and the demographics of the police force in Pittsburgh or anywhere else, our analysis does show that departments with the rule tend to reflect their communities less than departments without it.”

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No one is surprised that David Lynch loves to photograph old, decaying factories:

“David Lynch: The way the light can fall on a factory is the same way the light can fall on a body. One slight turn of the light and it’s a brand new thing. It just keeps going on and on and on … It’s disappearing. In north England, I was in search of what I was told would be the greatest factories. The time I was up there, they were destroying one smokestack every week. All the factories were being torn down. It was a nightmare for me. I couldn’t believe it. I missed them by just a couple of years.”

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Uh, I guess we just gotta distill our mojo and imbue it into everything we do?:

“I’m convinced that pretty much every place has a unique character. It might be hard to articulate, but it’s there. In Midwestern places like Ohio, there’s always a struggle to articulate identity. But visit Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus, and it’s instantly apparent these are three radically different cities. Places just need to do a little anthropological work to unearth their distinctiveness, distill it down and then imbue that “mojo” into everything they do.”