Subject: Communities

  • Obama-Biden: What Does It Mean?

    The text message hadn’t yet arrived: the media, once again, by way of stakeout, pestered its way to this scoop. After 1 a.m. Saturday morning, and after leaks throughout Friday evening indicated that Barack Obama’s vice presidential finalists were being…

  • What Responsibilities Do Institutions Have In Their Communities?

    I read with interest a recent story in The New York Times about Johns Hopkins University’s foray into redevelopment in East Baltimore. The school has teamed with private and public interests to level a large part of the neighborhood and…

  • Employment as Crime Prevention

    With the hottest, often most violent, month of summer still to come, Chicago has logged record numbers of killings of public school students this year, with at least 30 teens gunned down or otherwise murdered since last fall. This mirrors…

  • A Messy Food Fight

    Everyone’s a little tense about groceries lately—eggs up to an average of $2.18 a dozen from $1.45 in 2006, whole milk around $3.87 a gallon, up from $3.20 two years ago. But here in Los Angeles we’ve had our food…

  • Core and Periphery: “Trading Places”?

    In a cover story for the latest issue of The New Republic, Governing Magazine editor Alan Ehrenhalt proclaims that the American city has reinvented itself by becoming the suburbs. Ehrenhalt isn’t talking about the proliferation of strip mall CVS Pharmacy…

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    Let’s Talk About CDCs…

    ...that is if we could. Awareness of community development, both within the larger progressive movement and in the country as a whole, is tragically limited. This is due in part to the lack of a common language around which we…

  • Bluegrass, Rodeos, and Other Signs of a Living Community

    This weekend the small community where I live had its annual heritage fair. This is when people get together to celebrate the traditional arts that have helped the community sustain itself over the generations. What I always find notable about…

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    Down and Out in the Big Easy

    “Homeless outreach!” calls out Mike Miller as he ducks through a busted wall to climb the steps of an abandoned house in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood. Torn drywall hangs in scraps and old clothes, empty beer and food cans and…

  • Something Completely Different…

    For those looking for some light summer entertainment, try You Don’t Mess With The Zohan. Adam Sandler and crew take on the unlikely tale of a Mossad agent who decides to act on a long-buried desire to become, what else,…

  • Taking Blame for the Floods

    We stood at the end of a road leading into the waters of the Mississippi River, which had burst through a levee in Gulfport, Ill. and swamped thousands of acres of farmland and most of the town. The water, filled…