In June, the School District of Philadelphia’s long-running struggle to protect staff and students from asbestos in its aging buildings came to a head with federal criminal charges and an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to take care of the problem once and for all. The Justice Department alleges that the Philadelphia School District
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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 Saturday, Oct. 26, North Philly-based artist and children’s books author Alyssa Reynoso-Morris hosted a DIY water purification event at North Philly Peace Park. This was the final event of a three-part series called Stories Grow Here, organized by the Barnes Foundation. The series is a part of Barnes North’s Everyday Places Artists Partnerships, which
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At the turn of the 20th century, Philadelphia was one of the largest textile manufacturing cities in the country. Since the 1950s, the region’s ongoing deindustrialization has led to a sharp decline in textile mills, as well as in the number of farmers and artisans supporting the textile industry. Knowledge of how the industry operates
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For the Elmwood Park Zoo, conservation doesn’t just mean protecting wild animals, like the giraffes, jaguars and monkeys that live at the Norristown facility, but also the planet they inhabit. “We are not just species survival-based, we are also environmental survival-based, so we want to make sure we’re taking care of the planet as best
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When local productions need a feather boa to add to a costume or a vintage phone to serve as a prop, they know just where to look: to their fellow theater colleagues. The aptly named Resource Sharing Committee brings the Greater Philadelphia theater community together to share their materials for productions. The committee’s website has
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Bon Appétit! Pour yourself a glass and enjoy. Natural wineries in the Delaware Valley are producing reds and whites (and some oranges) from grapes grown nearby, rooting their wines — and their drinkers — in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey terroir. Cocoa doesn’t grow here quite yet, but it does in West Africa. Join a
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When visitors step into the Pray Tell Wines tasting room in a warehouse on a treeless street in Kensington, the first question they often ask is, “Where are the grapes?” It’s a fair question. In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where owner Tom Caruso ran Pray Tell for seven years before relocating to Philly in 2024, vineyards
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On Oct. 2, 2025, a swamp sparrow smacked into a glass door at the Independence Visitor Center and fell dead onto the entryway’s pavement. A volunteer window collision monitor with Bird Safe Philly found the bird and documented its demise. Volunteers found four dead or stunned birds that morning, with an additional 13 logged by
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As the holiday season approaches, college campus cafés are preparing for the influx of students ordering coffee and pastries to power them through final exams. But once the semester officially ends, what happens to the product that isn’t sold? That’s what Saxbys cafés across nine states tackled last academic year as they participated in the
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