It can be easy to get discouraged these days. Everywhere we look, there are signs of a struggling planet and, often, it’s difficult to see a clear path to an effectual response. 2022 may well eclipse recent years as the hottest on record. Rainfall has alternated between being absent or violent in Pennsylvania, one of
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by Claire Marie PorterOn half a city block of pavement in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, the kindergarteners of Richard Wright Elementary school play. One group hula-hoops, another plays kickball, while another waits in line to scooter-board from cone to cone. The playground is peaceful, there is nothing remarkable—which is perhaps what’s most remarkable.
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by Claire Marie PorterAbove a desk in an airy second-floor studio in Roxborough hangs a yellowing square photograph of a small girl with a curly pixie cut working a child-sized blue sewing machine.“I’ve been sewing since I was a baby,” says Heidi Barr, smiling at the shot.
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by Claire Marie PorterReborn with the help of blood, sweat and compost, a set of abandoned tennis courts in Germantown have been given a new lease on life.Owned by Germantown Friends School, the half-acre plot of land at 5407 Wissahickon Avenue containing the Old Tennis Court had sat unused since the 1980s.
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by Constance Garcia-BarrioMT. Rushmore would give a truer portrait of our nation’s makers if the sculptor had hewn kinky hair and a shapely eye into George Washington’s massive left cheek and a second eye, a pug nose, and luscious lips into the right side of Thomas Jefferson’s face.
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by Bernard BrownWhat’s your favorite sign of spring? Flowers blooming? Bees buzzing? Raptors hurtling into the water, talons first, emerging with a wriggling fish to rip apart back at the nest? Spring has returned to the Delaware Valley, and with it our local ospreys.
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by Randy LoBassoThis February Philadelphia City Council members held a hearing on whether or not to bring dockless e-scooter sharing into our transportation fold. With two e-scooters sitting in the chambers, citizens, company representatives and city employees filed in to give their arguments and testimonies for and against the new take on an old form
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by Constance Garcia-BarrioThe trouble during prayers that Sunday in 1787 at St. George’s Methodist Church on Fourth Street in Old City could have bloomed into a fistfight. “We had not long been upon our knees before I heard considerable scuffling and low talking,” Reverend Richard Allen (1760-1831) wrote years later. A trustee of white-led St.
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by Bernard BrownIn a room crowded with dusty reference books and bugs—some dead and pinned neatly in glass-topped boxes, others, like the stag beetle grub, alive and growing slowly on a diet of rotting tulip tree wood—assistant entomology curator Isa Betancourt, of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, adjusts her iPhone stand, brushes
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Today bike messenger Joe Cox spends his days riding the streets of Philadelphia. But tomorrow? He just might be running them.The pink-mohawk-sporting 32-year-old announced his campaign for a seat on Philadelphia City Council At-Large last year. He’s made himself known by protesting the city’s now defunct data-sharing agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and
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Two years ago, social worker Karen Krivit and her daughter, Lily Sage began developing the Philly Goat Project, and last year, the pair brought on Raymond, Oonagh, Teddy, Oliver, Annie, Bebito, Ivy and Anthony as bleating ambassadors. In warmer weather, the goats’ primary job is grazing, but this winter, they are focused on recycling Christmas trees.
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