News flash: a laundromat opened up recently. There’s plenty of space and a nice-sized seating area with convenient folding tables, and it offers free wireless Internet, which makes it attractive to college students. One minor problem may be its location – 17th and Diamond streets.
While this business may be relatively close to Main Campus, for […]

I didn’t grow up with God in my house. Or Muhammad or Buddha or Krishna. I went to a public school, so they didn’t show up there either. Some people would say I’m lucky to never have been influenced by a religious household. I’m a totally unbiased scholar, right?
Guess what I’m reading now in my […]

What if the Temple ‘T’ did not exist?
None of the shirts, hats, mugs, magnets, notebooks, flags, jerseys or key chains would be adorned with that single significant letter. They would be blank and ordinary things, no different from what could be found anywhere else.
Cars would drive down North Broad Street without ever knowing that they […]

Dear Dad,
I always thought it was strange that you never really dug Bob Dylan.
Especially because a major quality of his music, for me, was how he was reminiscent of you. I thought that if you became a folk protest singer when you were young, you’d make the same allegories and facetious jokes about hunting “reds” […]

When it comes to urban literature, most people expect to hear about the author’s struggle. In fact, most read it just to discover how bad the author had it while growing up in a place like North Philadelphia.
Readers want the underdog story of a boy who was in the midst of a drug-and-violence vortex, but […]