With the closing of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Drexel University has blundered into a spectacular public relations disaster. I could almost feel sorry for them, had their actions not been so cruel and heartless. When the news first broke, the reaction was a stunned grief. According to Drexel, this beloved museum, the public-facing side
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Dear Readers, Grid’s December issue, #211, will be its last in print. Our business model is no longer working. I have mixed feelings about making this announcement. As someone who has spent over three decades in this medium, I’m attached to it. I will forever prefer paper and ink to any other format. However, I’m
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How much do you love your park? Maybe enough to organize or participate in a cleanup, raise or donate money to make an improvement, or lead an educational walk. Or maybe you don’t have the time or money to donate, but simply find your local park to be a refuge — and appreciate the work
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When we went to print last month with “APOCALYPSE NOW” splashed across the cover in 138-point type above a raging Canadian wildfire, I wondered if people would think we were being alarmist. Little did I know that the cover would prove timely. It wasn’t just the smoky air from those Canadian fires haunting us. It
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My daughter lay in bed, her dark green cast propped on a stack of pillows. “This sucks,” she said. As a rule I discourage the use of the word “sucks,” an artifact of how I was raised. But after reviewing the facts — injured on the last play of the last game of the season,
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Some people turn to the ocean for philosophical reflection. The vastness, the rhythm of crashing waves — it gets the mind pondering. But for me, farms teach the same lesson on a more human scale. On a farm, a particular crop may only be around for a few weeks or months. You have a limited
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Donald Rumsfeld famously, or maybe infamously, once said, “[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
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As a parent of a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old who play baseball in West Philly’s Philadelphia Athletics Youth Sports Association (PAYSA), I know firsthand how hard it can be to find space to play organized sports. The league has grown from 170 kids in 2014 to around 300 today, with a waiting list of 20.
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In the late 18th century, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier radically changed how we understand the physical world. He was perplexed by the fact that when metal rusted, despite becoming more brittle, it actually gained weight rather than losing it. Why would metal weigh more when it was decomposing? It weighed more, Lavoisier came to
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You know the story about George Washington and his confession to his father about chopping down a cherry tree? Historians agree that it’s a myth, or if you are feeling less charitable, a lie. The story was not introduced until 1806 in the fifth edition of a Washington biography by Mason Locke Weems, a minister
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