Philadelphia City Paper Archives

It is 4:17 on a Thursday afternoon and Dionte Christmas and I are standing underneath the northernmost basket on the main court of Temple’s McGonigle Hall, talking hoops. He’s just come from the final class of his senior year, and he’s decked out in a blue and white button-down and dark navy...

For the past three years, Marilyn Bess has operated MS Philly Organic, a small, low-traffic blog that features occasional posts about green living, out of her Manayunk home. Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To Bess, her website is...

STUDENT DEATH: Laporshia Massey, 12, a student at Bryant Elementary School, became ill at school and died later that day. Sixth-grader Laporshia Massey died from asthma complications, according to her father, who says he rushed her to the emergency room soon after she got home from school on the afternoon of Sept....

Even as the Philly Mafia has declined in membership and power over the last three decades, it continues to be sought out by other organized-crime groups and gangsters longing to work with an established criminal network. This helps explain why the cops are still keeping an eye on them. It also helps...

A local man was kept off a recent flight because of a book he was carrying. Everyone knows it is a bad idea to try and board a plane carrying a box cutter, a flight manual written in Arabic, or a sack full of mysterious white powder. But with ultra-tightened airport security,...

Once a Pulitzer-winning machine that dominated the region, the Inquirer today is losing readers faster than any major paper in the country. What went wrong? Whenever he reaches the point of looking back on his time as editor and executive vice president of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Robert J. Rosenthal probably will not...

say college; you say kegger. I say naked; you say co-ed. It’s no wonder university sex rags can’t get no respect. JiaJia Fei, an aspiring photographer and junior art history major at Bryn Mawr College, wants to change that. And she may have founded the perfect literary erotica magazine to do it....

Rock may be struggling on the radio and dying on the charts, but it’ll never die if Dave Wyndorf has his way. As frontman for New Jersey’s finest psychedelic metal band Monster Magnet, Wyndorf creates some of the most brazenly outrageous, eardrum-splitting music around. Yet he also knows how keep it smart...

The story goes like this: In the little town of Cocullo, in the province of L’Aquila, Abruzzi, there dwell the serpari. These charmed descendants of Circe may handle the deadly biting vipers of Abruzzi with absolute impunity. Catholic tradition is overlaid onto ancient pagan rites in the annual Procession of San Domenico...

OK. So let’s get things straight. I want to correct what I said yesterday about Obama using a Zune. I claimed that it was his Zune. I don’t know for sure that it was his. It could belong to one of the many Secret Service dudes that were at the gym, Michelle,...