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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Cloudy in the glass and full of zingy life and pungency, a glass of wine shattered everything I’d previously believed about the drink. Wine had seemed boring or inaccessible, either anonymous and mediocre or interesting but wildly expensive. Then last year I tried a chardonnay from Australian natural wine producer Lucy Margaux Chardonnay. I was
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Films, books and ballads tell of the South during the Civil War (April 1861-April 1865), but they seem struck dumb about black women in the North during those turbulent times. However, the Quaker City has lucked out. “Emilie Davis’s Civil War, the Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863-1865, opens a personal window
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By Claire Marie PorterEvery kid deserves food, water, shelter and a pony,” reads one of many slogans at the Chamounix Equestrian Center. Tucked into the North Philadelphia Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, low-income youth have the opportunity to experience English-style horseback riding through a long-term equine sports program called Work to Ride.On a bright fall morning, mounted
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By Cynthia KreilickMy 92-year-old mother was sitting in the dining room of her nursing home, eating her first breakfast there. Everything was unfamiliar—the food, the place, the people. When my daughter and I arrived, she was disoriented and emotionally unhinged. As we tried to comfort her, a very frail, white-haired woman in a wheelchair rolled over,
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