At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
SOMERSET, KY — Ever since I reported and completed a project to suggest a new development strategy for Owensboro, KY. — and met and married one of the city’s great and beautiful civic leaders –I’ve been fascinated by the evolution of the Ohio River Valley. See a ModeShift archive here. Every economic era in American history opened along the river’s banks. Most of those that closed also weakened and died on a river that stretches …
SOMERSET, KY — A traveler’s story. One I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It was 6:30 p.m. about 12 hours before our scheduled flight home from Rome to Chicago. Gabrielle, Maggie, and I had just gotten off the train from Florence and I was exchanging dollars for euros at the central Rome station. The shoulder bag I’ve carried across six continents lay on the floor at my feet. Inside was $1,000 cash, my camera, glasses, IPad, …
ROME — Spending time in Rome, Italy during these last days of 2018 provides a useful reminder of human resiliency, and a note of reasoned assessment after this terrible week of political and financial churning at home. Remember from your history books that during the nearly 1,200 years of their empire, from the 8th century B.C. to mid-fifth century A.D., Romans suffered their share of incompetent, evil, wicked, inane, and miscreant emperors. Nero (54-68 A.D.) …
ROME — Public places all over the world are targets this century for mayhem and bloodshed. In the United States attackers armed with handguns and automatic weapons have put schools, churches, malls, music festivals, offices, and theaters in their gunsights. The country endures a mass killing every week. Hundreds have died. In Europe the risk of domestic mass killings is not nearly as keen as the threat of terrorism, much of it linked to Islamic …
SOMERSET, KY — This is the week that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is supposed to make public sentencing memorandums for three Trump allies who pled guilty to various illegal acts committed in and out of service to the president. From what’s been made public, and from what I know from fact-checking Seth Abramson’s book, Proof of Collusion, it’s not going to be pretty or something to celebrate. The country has been in a state …
SOMERSET, KY. — A chilly wind again whipped the flags flying at half staff here in central Kentucky. This time it was for George Bush, who died on Friday. Three weeks ago Jews were massacred in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Collegians were massacred in a bar and dance hall near Los Angeles. The two tragedies are linked by America’s miserable devotion to assault weapons and spilled blood. Flags flew at half staff then, too. There is …
OWENSBORO, KY. — This flourishing city of more than 59,000 residents has occupied the high ground on a big bend of the Ohio River so long that its history includes being the winter encampment for the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804. Owensboro’s famous sons include Johnny Depp, who was born here in 1963. Among its notable achievements is surviving the loss of 6,000 General Electric manufacturing jobs at the end of the 20th century, …
TRAVERSE CITY, MI —Romance, certainly the most elemental energy we know, flows like human life itself. Its headwaters charge off the slopes of new love, adventurous, boiling, unstoppable. Further along, the currents of romance grow powerful and certain. The way ahead, after all, promises eddies of delight and shoals of distress. There is no way around that. Those fortunate to have married the right partner know that marriage is the sacred pact that ties two …
REDDING, CA. — Cities along the Carolina coast were under water this month. Neighborhoods in California’s northern highlands were incinerated in July and August. Mother Earth is pushing back hard in this quickly unfolding era of ecological menace and there are twice as many people in the way as there were 40 years ago. I’m in California reporting for ProPublica on the causes and the solutions to the state’s wildfire emergency. You’ve heard something no …
Like a herd of wild bulls, raging floodwaters stampeded across a highland plateau in July and tore a hole in the mammoth Xi-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydropower complex dam in south central Laos. The boiling torrent crashed downstream from the nearly completed $1 billion dam, drowning 39 people identified so far, leaving over 100 more missing, and forcing more than 6,600 people out of their homes and into temporary government housing. Little more than a month later, …
