Our recent issue about What Knoxville Needs stirred up an old futuristic dream that won’t die. We talk about it today in the same tones we used in the ’60s when we talked about jet packs and hovercraft and computers.

The year’s only a few days old, but Knoxville has already lost two influential and very different architects.

Finally, we’ve arrived in a gracefully nameable era. For 13 years now, those of us who are accustomed to making sense of our recent past by sorting it into decades with distinct personalities, like the ’20s or the ’50s, haven’t ...

A funny thing about the news: It always rhymes.

One century ago, a dozen different Knoxvillians might give you a dozen different ideas about what constituted a Christmas tradition. There survived a few people old enough to recall when Knoxville hardly celebrated Christmas at all. Until the ’40s—the 1840s—it ...

And there’s been a pretty extravagant variety of very local books this year. These are the ones I’ve encountered and, for one reason or another, been impressed with.

That anyone named Grimaldi ever lived in 1870s Knoxville might be surprising in itself.

Scaling the Lilliputian ramparts of Fort Higley last week, I hardly knew the place. One of the two best-preserved Civil War battlements in Knox County, the little fort’s been half-forgotten in these South Knoxville woods for the last 149 years, ...

No big fan of chain-link fences to begin with, I especially hate to see that fence go up around the Aconda Court building on Cumberland Avenue and what’s now Volunteer Boulevard, and some other historic buildings just behind it, just ...

Saturday I was at work downtown, as I am most Saturdays, catching up on stuff. I’d been half paying attention to the Missouri game on my desk radio, when early in the fourth quarter I went out to get a ...

Here’s my theory, in a nutshell. You’re liberal, I’m liberal. You’re conservative, I’m conservative. We’re probably conservative or liberal about different things. My theory, and I’m sticking to it, is that everybody is both conservative and liberal, maybe even in ...

One thing Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and Green Partisans can agree on is that we’ve all survived presidents we don’t like, presidents we thought were dangerous idiots who’ve wasted our money. Maybe that’s the foundation for a new dialogue.

It’s a school. It’s a controversy. It’s a former voting place that lost its status over what critics claim was a politically based charge about handicap access. This will be the first year in many decades that voters haven’t been ...

You never know what you’ll encounter along Gay Street on a Saturday night.

Knoxville’s been agonizing about its identity for a good while. Are we a major educational center, a green-tech energy powerhouse? Or “authentic,” the Just-Folks Capital of the USA?