Letter From Michiana: Mayor Pete

His eclectic personal story seems uniquely suited to our moment…he can, in other words, speak personally about a variety of experiences in ways most other candidates can’t.

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Letter From Michiana: Our newest national park

This national park, you realize, is actually a last line of resistance, a green and blue membrane holding back the accumulated pressure human will has piled on the earth and insisted was progress.

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Letter From Michiana: Addicted to coal

This wasn’t going to be easy. Getting over an addiction can be excruciating. And everybody knows Indiana is hooked on coal. The Hoosier state ranks third in the nation in coal consumption. We’re seventh in coal production. Being this dependent on a famously cancer-causing substance can cause an addict to resort to all kinds of […]

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Letter From Michiana: Waiting on a train: the pressure to suburbanize

Suburbanization could efface the remarkable compound of urban grit and natural beauty that makes Michigan City unlike any other community in Michiana.

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Letter From Michiana: Standing up to Hoosier colonialism: Karen Tallian’s SB 553

Hoosiers in Michiana are long used to being treated like a colony. In the first place, where most of Indiana is landlocked, we live on one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. This has not only set us apart, it has set us up for exploitation

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Letter From Michiana: Battling Privatizing Beach Zombies: Who Are Those Guys?

A lot of people — Hoosiers included — don’t think of beaches when they think of Indiana.  But our beaches are one this state’s most valuable natural resources, places of great beauty that also create and contribute to a sense of shared community.

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Mysteries common to us all: The art of Lois Main Templeton

By David Hoppe I first met Lois Main Templeton at the Faris Building in 1988. My wife and I had moved to Indianapolis with our pre-school son in March of that year. An ice storm descended on the city during our first night in the duplex we rented in Broad Ripple. When we awoke, morning […]

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Not about Trump

The trouble is that unlike other presidents — those who bothered reading the job description — the current model doesn’t like how Constitutional stuff, like checks and balances, the separation of powers, and that thing about how no one, not even POTUS, is above the law, keeps getting in his way.

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Mari Evans’ radical clarity

“When I was five I knew that life was a game one played and that controlling the board or the pieces would be difficult. Nobody told me that, I just understood it. And I knew that the game board was about color and control, and nobody had ever said that to me, but I knew it.”

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