urbanmennonite.com

So how’s that checkpoint thing going? Well, no one got shot in the neighborhood since they set it up so if you are using that as your guidepost, then everything is great! Just ignore the 8 people that did get shot last night because you’ll notice on the map that none of [...]

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So yesterday, a couple of hours before the checkpoint went up down the block, I get a visit from a door-to-door salesman. He works for … wait for it …. a security systems company and wanted to let me know about the latest upgrades to their system.
Coincidence? He says yes. I say [...]

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So lately, my lovely neighborhood has seen a spot o’ trouble. For reasons unknown, there’s been some a lot of violence, record-breaking even. Double the amount of break-ins and homicides over last year.
So the solution? Checkpoints.
Of course, why haven’t we done this before, it’s so obvious! Let’s seal off certain neighborhoods. [...]

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Richard Florida, author of The Creative Class and a bunch of related books, has another map out that looks at personalities and cities.
Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to [...]

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Firecrackers crackle. There’s a little bit of an echo, a variation in sound. And they tend to have a random rhythm. Gunfire — its got no crackle, just the snap and the pop. And there’s nothing randomly rhythmic about them.
I’ve been hearing some of the former in my neighborhood. The [...]

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I go up to New York City for work probably two to three times a year. Which sounds very cool and exotic and … citified. Growing up in Iowa, New York City was like Shangrai-la; a place that very few people went to and those that did, almost never came back. It was full [...]

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April 5, as was pointed out in many a church and news organization, was the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Politicians did the photo ops, TV did their special look backs and all the nation paused for a minute, shook our head sadly, worried about Obama (isn’t he a little like [...]

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So there’s a complaint amongst single straight women in DC that goes something like “where are all the single men?” Turns out, they’re in Dallas, Denver and Seattle.
Richard Florida, who’s written some really interesting books about the creative class [that's us basically] and urban living (like why Seattle is thriving while Detroit is dying), [...]

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That biennial ritual is upon me again. As sure as a cherry blossom spring in DC, a gay Republican sex scandal, and a gridlocked Congress is a DC jury duty summons in the mail. DC residents have learned that they will be called every two years to jury duty — not so much [...]

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One of the great things about living in DC (or any Northeast city for that matter) is how easy it is to get from DC-Wilmington, DE-Philadelphia-New York and points between on Amtrak. Growing up in Iowa, train travel was something weird, romantic and exotic, definitely East Coast and very New York-ish; something that worldly sophisticates [...]

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