Alexander Torrey’s business idea came to him shortly after he ran out of hand soap. He’d placed an order for another bottle online, and when the replacement arrived, he was dismayed. “It came in a box the size of my kitchen table,” he remembers. He opened the package, pulled out the soap and put it
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If you pop into Olde Kensington’s Liberty Kitchen these days, a batch of colorful macarons in a glass display may very well catch your eye. They are from Mac’n! by Mari, a one-woman macaron operation run by Mari Terise, a North Philly resident who hails from New York. “It’s striking how many different flavors she
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As the beginning of the pandemic left people with sleepless nights and unending anxiety, many turned to a natural remedy to help with their dread and gloom: lavender. Lavender sales surged internationally in 2020. The farms that grow these little purple flowers in the Philadelphia area felt the newfound demand. It’s been a busy year
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Khalil steward first envisioned Philly Farmacy while working on a class project at Delaware Valley University. “I had an idea for a school bus or old ambulance turned into a mobile produce store,” Steward says. The mental image stayed with him, and he made Philly Farmacy a reality in 2019, a year after graduating from
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By Shari Hersh, Ron Whyte and Emma Wu While many people are experiencing pandemic fatigue, understandably eager for a return to normalcy, the COVID-19 crisis remains far from over. India is experiencing a nightmarish second wave that has led to overcrowded hospitals and critical shortages of lifesaving medical equipment. In its neighboring country Nepal, the
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It was flooding in the Ablett Village public housing development in Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood. It had rained overnight from Saturday, April 24, into Sunday, April 25, and that brought water that pooled in driveways and on the sidewalks running between the area’s long, two-story brick apartment buildings. This is not at all unusual, according
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Since ancient greece, and maybe earlier, humans have shared stories of wounded healers—people whose own injuries seem to confer upon them the gift of relieving other people’s pain. Multimedia artist Terrence Gore, 56, of West Philadelphia seems such a person. “Doctors gave me 30 days to live at one point,” he says. “That was 15
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About 120 years ago a nature enthusiast named Charles McIlvaine explored the Angora Woods of West Philadelphia hunting for mushrooms. While most of the Angora Woods have long since been built up, a fringe of the area remains along Cobbs Creek. It was there that I met up with a modern-day fungi enthusiast, Luke Smithson.
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While it seems like just yesterday, it was six years ago that a world-famous hitchhiking robot was smashed in Philadelphia. The robot—dubbed hitchBOT—was originally created by a Canadian research team. It “could carry a limited conversation” and “took a photo every 20 minutes,” according to the Associated Press. HitchBOT had previously made its way across
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When Victoria Wright was getting married, her husband bought a made-to-measure suit for their wedding. The purchase was a lightbulb moment for her. She thought to herself “Why doesn’t this exist for women?” Now, she’s bringing a made-to-measure brand that does to Philadelphia. “Women have so many fit issues, I feel like every other day
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