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Roadtrip: Buried, with dignity, in Elmira
Every place is a palimpsest with layer upon layer of history written atop one another. Every so often you have the opportunity to scratch below the surface and see the strata of history. One of those...
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Roadtrip: Side quest in Northern Ohio
Sunday morning in Youngstown Ohio, I almost put my road trip to an abrupt halt. I had just visited a surplus store near downtown which featured in its parking lot an “urban assault vehicle”, a...
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Roadtrip: In search of the “statistically improbable restaurant”
The first thing I do when I come to an unfamiliar city is look for where I want to eat. This is in part because I am a large man and eating is one of my primary pleasures in life. But looking for...
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Roadtrip: Decatur, from corn to soy to cricket city?
Heading into Decatur on Illinois Route 48, you quickly begin to sense a pattern. You pass a field of corn followed by a field of soybeans. Soybeans, then corn, corn, then soybeans. The highway follows...
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Road trip: Peoria to Kankakee
In 1999, a book called The Places Rated Almanac offered a ranking of American cities in terms of their desirability as places to live. There are a lot of these rankings – they’re now a staple of...
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Roadtrip: Utica Starts With You
I tried to write this post from the last leg of my trip, between Utica, NY and Pittsfield, MA. I’ve been dictating posts as I go, recording on my iPhone and transcribing using MacWhisper, a Mac port of...
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Roadtrip: A tale of two cities
Cities change over time. Communities that were organized around production of steel or auto parts or glass are now organized around finance and healthcare, tourism and universities. There’s a tendency...
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Road trip: The Company Town and the Corn Fields
“The rest rooms are upstairs. Turn left at the Chihuly.” While those aren’t the directions I usually expect to hear in the Visitors Center of a small city, Columbus, Indiana is anything but an ordinary...
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What if our nation is not built for climate change?
Florida is preparing for Hurricane Milton, the second significant storm in two weeks to impact the southern US. Hurricane Helene killed at least 220 people and caused horrific damage in North Carolina,...
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Danielle Allen at UMass Amherst on “How to be a Confident Pluralist”
Danielle Allen is one of the great thinkers of our generation… by which I mean the GenX generation that teeters on the brink between hopelessness about the future of democracy and passion about the...
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