A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Comcast Technology Center. It was my first time inside that gleaming skyscraper, designed to knock your socks off with escalators rising above “Exploding Paradigms,” a sculpture of mirrored triangles that the company describes as “a steel vortex heading into the sky.” Just past the top of the
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On Sunday afternoon I made the mistake of turning on a football game. For twenty minutes I sat on the sofa and watched about 18 minutes of advertisements and replays interspersed with about two minutes of actual game play. I used to spend hours doing this on Sundays, but over the past 20 years, I’ve
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A human wrote this, and a human edited it. A human laid out this page too. I could have asked one of the popular generative artificial intelligence models to compose a 600-word essay, in this case about the concerns a middle-aged writer and editor holds about a flood of environmentally destructive new technology that threatens
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Red-eared sliders are turtles that make bad pets, but that doesn’t stop them from being sold to people who don’t know better. They start off as cute hatchlings, but they can live 40 years and grow as large as dinner plates, at that point needing way more space than the usual aquarium. Ill-prepared owners often
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Lately, as I’ve walked through the city, I’ve found myself crisscrossing from one side of the street to the other based on the angle of the sun and how much shade the street trees offer. We’ve had a hot, humid stretch here in July, recalling the fierce heat wave in June. It did occur to
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My daughter and I wended our way through the streets of our West Philly neighborhood, shunted block after block by fire department barricades. We were heading from a playground, where we had started the morning, to the supermarket, but there was a burning vacant apartment building in the way. As we followed the downwind side
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Every year the Trust for Public Land releases its ParkScore ratings, and every year Philadelphians have something to be disappointed about: how little the City spends on its parks. ParkScore ranks the 100 most populous cities in the country using a list of measures gauging the size of the park system (acreage), what the parks
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Back in February, The Philadelphia Inquirer published an op-ed by former Mayor Michael Nutter that left me feeling confused. The piece argues for the role of fossil gas in the home energy mix for Philadelphians, because, Nutter claims, renewables are simply too expensive for low-income households. Yes, this is the same Michael Nutter who, in
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A few years ago a friend moved to the suburbs after decades in Philadelphia. Last week she came over for dinner, and she joked about a chicken bone she stepped over on the sidewalk on her way to our West Philly door. There’s nothing like chicken bones to let you know you’re back in the
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I had never heard of the Philadelphia Art Commission back in 2022 when I tuned in to a Zoom meeting about plans to build a driving range at the Cobbs Creek Golf Course. When reporting on a public meeting of a City commission, it’s not uncommon to find yourself waiting impatiently through all the other
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