Last week I was at the 12th Annual North American Passive House Conference in Seattle. The event is produced by the Passive House Institute US (PHIUS)—I’ve been a board member or employee of PHIUS off and on for the better part of 15 years now. Every year, the event brings together building science geeks to […]

Awhile back I posted about Hillbilly Elegy, a book that has gotten a lot of attention and raised a lot of hackles. Author J.D. Vance tells the story of his upbringing in Ohio, and of his forbears and other family members’ roots in Appalachia. The people Vance describes initially thrived in industrial Ohio, but eventually […]

Earlier this year Beth gave her senior writers at the Chicago Cultural center this prompt: My Favorite Year. Anu Agrawal chose 1969, when she and her husband immigrated from India. Anu shared her reminiscences about seeing the lakefront for the first time, the museums, and Marshall Field’s here at the Safe & Sound blog back […]

When I moved to the D.C. area in the late 1970s, I was flabbergasted to routinely run across vestiges and glorifications of various Civil War figures. I mean, a guy from the Land of Lincoln can be uncomfortable driving on Jefferson Davis Highway. That’s when my naïveté about what the Civil War had accomplished—and how […]

Here’s a piece Ninety-five-year-old Wanda Bridgeforth wrote after her WGN Radio interview last weekend. Remembering DuSable by Wanda Bridgeforth The interview with Dave Hoekstra and Beth Finke brought back more memories of my happy days at DuSable High School. On February 1, 1935, it was a thrill to be entering a Brand-New building at the […]