What if you’re a freelance food writer, observing the restaurant culture of Atlanta, Georgia, and suddenly you’re stuck at home like everyone else? How do you cope? You could open a restaurant… for a chipmunk. For Angela Hansberger, this strategy started when her uncle, owner of a bowling center in Ohio that COVID-19 shut down,
Stir-crazy from avoiding COVID-19? If you’re a Disney fan, help is on the way! Veteran Disney author/historian Jim Korkis and editor Bob McLain have announced two new books — Just in time for Halloween is Vault of Walt 9: Halloween Edition: Spooky Stories of Disney Films, Theme Parks, and Things That Go Bump In the
Have you ever seen a problem and think “Someone should do something about that”? Dutch fashion designer Bas Timmer was starting a career as a cold weather-gear specialist in 2014 when he saw a homeless man one cold night. He could’ve given the man one of his signature fashion hoodies, but what would’ve that done
We seem to have fallen into a trap. The warmer our climate gets, the more refrigeration we need to cool both us and our perishables (already we have an estimated 3.5 billion refrigerators and air conditioners), which means generating more energy, which has always meant releasing more greenhouse gases. What if there was a way
How many unused items do you own? The city of Berlin, Germany estimates that every household has almost 250 unused items. This is a real problem considering Berlin has a goal of eventually becoming a zero-waste city. So how do you get people to reuse items when it’s so easy to find replacements? One idea
It’s pretty much accepted that a mass extinction 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, led to the end of the age of the dinosaurs. This catastrophic event has been blamed on an asteroid impact, although volcanic eruptions and gradual climate change may also have been factors. Of course, this was
We know there were no women in the Continental Congress. And yet, when the Declaration of Independence was printed with the signatures (actually the second printing), at the very bottom is the line “Baltimore, in Maryland: Printed by Mary Katharine Goddard”. How did that happen? Things were not going well for the rebellion in the
In this age of advanced medicine, and especially during a pandemic, there is one medical tool we should be using more, but are not — the autopsy. The truth is autopsies are invaluable for discovering the cause of death, but they are, pardon the expression, dying out. In the late 1960s, the autopsy rate in
Normally I don’t discuss politics here, and I didn’t watch last night’s Presidential Debate. I usually don’t watch speeches, either. I monitor a half-dozen news feeds, and I figure if anything important happens, I’ll learn about it that way. But what these news sources have told me today has caused an assessment of our current
Yesterday, September 28, was the the anniversary of the 1918 parade that turned the city of Philadelphia into a Spanish flu hotspot. “Spanish flu” is a misnomer. The disease probably came from a Midwestern farm animal or bird. The culprit was the H1N1 virus, which moved through various animal populations, then mutated into a strain