Gather up a minute before the whistle. I want to talk about October. Seventy-seven years ago this week, on the first of October 1949, about
Month: September 2026
We Make the Power. Why Are We Paying Their Bill? Pennsylvania doesn’t have an energy problem. It has a who-pays problem. Start with what this
Shelby Kelley’s Portraits of the Animals That Keep Him Centered Shelby Kelley’s attachment to wolves began with a dog. During a childhood he describes as
Across the country, old rail lines are turning into trails. The ties come up, crushed stone goes down, and a corridor that once carried coal
Somebody taped the coin vault shut. Two strips of silver duct tape hold the bottom of this phone together, and the black enamel has worn
There is an old saying from the ballpark about rooting for laundry. Players get traded, coaches get fired, owners sell the franchise, and the fans
Double Hull: A Data Center That Breathes Through Its Walls A Bright Meadow Group concept paper Observe: Two Resources Going Up the Stack A data
Threads has been running a trend where someone posts “my thread is a safe space for…” and fills the blank with a political identity. Pro-gun
What I Overheard at the Coffee Shop (EEEK) I was at my usual table by the window Saturday morning, the one with the wobbly leg
The West End Kid Who Drew Spider-Man, and the Walls That Remember Him A freight car sits on the tracks behind a concrete wall, and
A Bright Meadow Group tour of Johnstown, for people who build things Come into Johnstown on Route 56 and the road does the selling. The
Mr. Wright on tax brackets, write-offs, and why the same labor fights keep coming back around. I sat down this week meaning to write about
Bridges Bright Meadow Group civic architecture Design Johnstown Machinery Man Made Thought Experiments Vehicles
Ninety Seconds Up Yoder Hill
The Johnstown Inclined Plane, Johnstown, Pennsylvania The view on the cover comes at the end of the ride. Downtown sits spread across the valley floor:
The Help Is There. A Lot of Us Aren’t Getting It. Some weeks the news reads like four strangers at the same bar, each nursing
Aquaponics Bright Meadow Group Cernunnos Foundation Design Environmental River Refugium Project Science and Research Thought Experiments
What Should Be Living There
The Gulf dead zone gets reported as an area on a map. Read it as a missing nursery and the fix comes into focus. I
We use the word “outlaw” to mean a person who breaks the law. The older sense ran the other direction. To be outlawed was to
Culture Government Navy Paleontology republican Virtue Science and Research Thought Experiments Veteran
On the Discretion of the Moonlight
A republic asks a great deal of the people it hands command to, and it asks something of itself in return. It owes them rules
A Bright Meadow Group concept piece At about ten at night on the first of August, 1798, the largest warship in the Mediterranean came apart
I had one plan for Tuesday morning: a cinnamon oat latte, the corner table by the window, and forty-five minutes with my receipt-list before work.
Pull up a crate. Today’s date carries some weight. September seventeenth, nineteen hundred. John Mitchell and the United Mine Workers called the hard-coal miners of
Artificial Intelligence Cernunnos Foundation Culture Design Energy Environmental Johnstown Science and Research Thought Experiments
The Makings of a Better Reality
Step off the trail into an old hardwood stand in late October and you are standing inside the finest materials-recovery operation on the continent. A
Curiosity, Applied: A Reintroduction to Blue Ribbon Team Read Blue Ribbon Team one piece at a time and it looks like several magazines sharing a
We know where everything is. We’ve known for seventy years. Before anything else: I’m sorry. This isn’t what you come here for. You come here
Aquaponics Bright Meadow Group Cernunnos Foundation Environmental River Refugium Project Science and Research Thought Experiments
Did the Dead Zone Shrink?
Second Smallest Dead Zone in Forty Years, and a Storm Wrote the Number Tropical Storm Bertha turned the northern Gulf over on the eve of
The Money Came Back. The Paycheck Didn’t. A lot of money is finally flowing into Appalachian Pennsylvania. Is it flowing through to the people who
There is a barbed wire fence in Rio Arriba County that runs along a line a court drew in the 1890s. On one side, grazing.
Labor Day gets treated as a Monday when the bank is closed. The unofficial end of summer. A mattress sale. The last decent weekend to
Aquaponics Bright Meadow Group Cernunnos Foundation Design Permaculture River Refugium Project Science and Research Thought Experiments
The Refugium Is Not a Filter
River Refugium Project — Design Notes The River Refugium Project has a stage in it that people consistently misread. They look at the biofiltration train,
The right is arguing about the wrong door, and the left is knocking on it too politely There is a version of the health care
Sit down a minute. September third means something. Nineteen sixteen. Four brotherhoods — engineers, firemen, conductors, trainmen — around four hundred thousand men voted to
An argument for building machine reasoning as an ecosystem instead of a pipeline Every serious effort to make machine reasoning more reliable runs in the
A Bright Meadow Group design note on the hundred feet we may not need to cross Observe → Design → Intervene Heather Dean ran a
The Mutt Republic The feed store puts the seed catalogs out in February, which is the closest thing this county has to a holiday. I
DELIVERED IN THE INTERVAL BEFORE THE LAST TWO PIECES CONNECT I want to begin by admitting that I lied to each of you, and that
Man Made: Chrome, Checkerboard, and the Car The sign is shaped like a cross because of arithmetic. Sheldon “Red” Chaney meant to letter it HAMBURGER,