Archive

The Mütter Museum preserves a rare, endlessly fascinating 19th-century collection of anatomical specimens, medical devices and other such biological oddities—from skulls and petrified corpses to the organs of conjoined twins. Curator Anna Dhody is the lucky geek who gets to oversee that collection; she’ll wax poetic about her job at a Philadelphia Science Festival event on...

On March 29, 1988, an album that propelled two kids from West Philadelphia into the stratosphere of international fame was released on Jive Records: DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper. Their debut LP, 1987’s Rock the House, included the mild hit single, “Girls Ain’t Nothing But Trouble,” but...

For the past three decades, Cleveland-born saxophonist Joe Lovano has been the hardest working man in the jazz business, performing and recording in bop, opera and third stream formats and in duo, trio, quartet, nonet and symphonic configurations. But for the last few years, Lovano’s been leading his Us Five quintet, a...

Most of your friends who moved to Boulder to “just live for a little while” probably found it redundant when Colorado legalized recreational marijuana last month in a statewide ballot referendum. But they did. And so did Washington state. Which means, who knows, marijuana legalization could come here soon, too, right? Tradition would say...

The opening minutes of A Late Quartet find aging cellist Peter (Christopher Walken) reading a T.S. Eliot passage to a class, which underscores the different parts of a group adding up to a working whole. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie—which is not to say a musty vibe is an automatic demerit, or that...

A second voter-ID hearing is set to begin in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Sept. 13. But what’s been less talked about in-state is the push for a ‘voter purge’ in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The purge talk began when newly elected Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) decided in February 2011 that it...

  As an ad slamming President Obama’s tax policies prompts a YouTube video, local software developer Bob Lannon takes out his iPhone. He opens up an app, holds it to the speaker and puts his thumb to a big button in the middle of the screen. Within 25 seconds, the app returns...

Pete Angevine, Jeffrey Ziga and Martin Brown, the three co-founders of Little Baby’s Ice Cream, picked a hell of a day to unveil their new business. May 21, 2011: Judgment Day, according to an attention-grabbing Christian end-times cult, wherein the entire planet, Philadelphia not excluded, would be consumed by earthquakes, rivers of...

Four people in 18-year-old Edgar Pagan’s life had been shot to death on the streets of Philadelphia by the time he graduated high school last week. While reflecting on his time at Girard College—a 1-12 boarding school for kids with high grades who come from families with low bank accounts—Pagan realized he...

As Peggy Reavey, David Lynch’s first wife, notes in this week’s cover story on the Eraserhood, the iconic director was “very terrified” of Philadelphia during most of the time he lived here (from 1965 until 1970), even as he was getting his lauded career off the ground. So why did he come...