Until last Tuesday I had never met Chris Martenson nor had I ever met anyone in the area who knew of him; A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country after all. When I contemplate the different forms of resilience capital, as Chris and Adam Taggart explain it, the most ephemeral is
As I read the story of the Wisconsin Girl Scouts murdered by a pickup truck careening off the road and into a ditch where the girls were picking up trash I was startled by this quote: Not an unsafe area. Hard to imagine anywhere less safe if you are a human not clothed in an
In Springfield you can play a game called “count the sidewalks”, and the number you get from 0-2 tells you when that street was developed. Two sidewalks narrows it down to a nearly 300 year window from 1636 to the early 1900’s* one sidewalk is from that time into the early post war period, and
When the Amazing World of Dr Seuss Museum opened last year to great fanfare and large crowds it immediately became mired in controversy as a local artist charged with the task of selecting illustrations from Ted Geisel’s works to replicate on the walls of the converted Connecticut Valley Historical Museum chose to paint this: Three
I understand that the folks at CityLab don’t know that I exist and have never heard of RationalUrbanism, but it still feels as though they really are just trying to get my goat having published yet another tribute to an American modernist whose best works appear to, on their best day and in just the
I attended the funeral of an old friend last weekend. He was 14 years my senior and we had been friends from when I was in my teens until I hit my mid thirties. He was a very significant religious leader in his faith, I became an unbeliever, and his knees and his heart didn’t
The entire family made a concerted effort this summer to expand LunaLucia’s world. She needs it. She’s too bright, too energetic, too inquisitive, and too restless to be happy just hanging around the house. It started with some walks around the house, around the block, and down to our neighborhood’s little Italian shops: a little
The remnants of Hurricane Florence making for some wet going on Maple Street last month: From my experience news outlets don’t distinguish sharply between urban, suburban, and rural areas while covering the aftermath of disasters but, for obvious reasons, I try to parse the news reports in exactly those ways. I do this because both
USA Today and 24/7 Wall Street have concluded that I live in the worst city in Massachusetts, or at least that Springfield is the worst city in which to live in the Bay State. It comes from a list of the worst cities in each state. It’s hard to imagine what the justification is for
What more can I say about MGM but that it is a game changer, and not just a game changer but a life changer. Since the development opened in August we’ve spent time on the property every weekend but one; at the movies, playing games in the arcade, listening to live music, or just resting