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1 week ago | 
ministrywatch.com | Bill Wichterman |Molly Worthen |Deborah Fallows |Warren Smith
Editor’s Note: Most Saturdays we feature this “Editor’s Notebook” column. MinistryWatch President Warren Smith will offer his opinion on stories in the week’s news or, sometimes, offer a behind-the-scenes look at how and why we do what we do. However, once a quarter (or so), we use the ‘Notebook” for Warren Smith’s list of books either released in the past quarter, or those he just got around to reading this quarter. To read last quarter’s list, published in November, click here.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
politix.fm | James Fallows |Deborah Fallows
Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. This week, Matt and Brian take stock of the many ways Republicans have flailed since Donald Trump lost last week’s debate against Kamala Harris:If they’re trying to change the topic, or convince people Trump won, why are so many MAGA influencers still trying to “prove” ABC rigged the debate for Harris?
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Aug 5, 2024 | 
ourtownsfoundation.org | Deborah Fallows
Libraries are having their day. They’re no longer the “best kept secret in town”. They’re no longer whisper-quiet. They’re still about books, but also about so much more. Libraries have come full-circle in a way, with today’s maker spaces harkening back to Ben Franklin’s experiments with electricity at the Philadelphia Library Company.
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May 9, 2024 | 
ourtownsfoundation.org | Deborah Fallows
Around the time Our Towns was published six years ago, in 2018, people would occasionally ask Jim and me whether we had found projects about the environment and climate change in the communities we visited. I remember thinking to myself, “a few, but actually not that much,” as we scrambled to come up with examples.
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Feb 16, 2024 | 
ourtownsfoundation.org | Deborah Fallows
Jim and I had always felt a little guilty about shortshrifting Florida in our Our Towns reporting. We tried, but the right place at the right time never quite came together. We did write briefly about a powerful reparations ceremony in Pensacola, by a family of a local 20th century leader later found to have been an active leader of the Ku Klux Klan. We also wrote about citizen environmentalists tracking sea turtles on the Gulf Coast beaches.
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Dec 12, 2023 | 
ourtownsfoundation.org | Deborah Fallows |James Fallows
At Our Towns, we’ve been following the tools and applications of geospatial information systems (GIS), as they have progressed from promise to delivery. GIS helps in countless ways: for cities to track services and engage citizens; for businesses to become more efficient; for responders to react to or ward off disasters, to name a few. Recently, we had the chance to judge a competition of StoryMaps, which is a web-based application that uses GIS tools to enhance storytelling of all sorts.
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Oct 28, 2023 | 
ourtownsfoundation.org | Deborah Fallows
This could be a story of high school students in Mississippi, raising the profile of a historic moment of school desegregation in the 1960s South and noting it for posterity with a marker on the grounds of the school. That would be quite enough. But the story is really much more than that. It is a story of a “systems success,” of many players working together to celebrate a nearly-forgotten moment and make it indelible.
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Oct 3, 2023 | 
ourtownsfoundation.org | Deborah Fallows
Through the coming year, the public library system here in Washington DC is hosting a Centennial Celebration of the life and works of James Baldwin, born on August 2, 1924. This week, libraries in DC are having events as part the nationally designated Banned Books Week. One of our local libraries opened the week with a reading from James Baldwin’s works. I had heard about banned books readings at other libraries across the country and decided to see one for myself.
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Oct 1, 2023 | 
ourtownsfoundation.org | Deborah Fallows
Town residents are very good at taking stock of their own community’s natural assets. If you ask people what’s special about their town, they’ll quickly list the walking and biking trails; the parks, lakes, or riverfronts; the wide-open spaces or rolling hills. Sometimes they’ll talk about the natural light, which artists love. Or the fresh mountain air. Or, surprisingly often, the taste of the local drinking water.
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Sep 3, 2023 | 
ourtownsfoundation.org | Deborah Fallows
We check in regularly with our friends at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS). They’ve always got something new and impressive to report. They always spur us to think big-picture about the young people of today, the potential of education, and even the state of Mississippi. Here is what we’ve learned recently and are sharing through two short podcasts. One is about and by an MSMS student on what the Jackson MS water crisis means to young people living through it.
