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A key part of the Mercury launch is the formation of a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit, an educational organization known as the Knoxville History Project. It’s surprising, when you think about it, that Knoxville, almost 225 years old, has never had its […]

Last week I was at Time Warp Tea Room for a full house, a satisfying and inexpensive meal on a cold February night. Proprietor Dan Moriarty presides over the Time Warp like a benevolent spirit. It’s usually not a crowded […]

I can’t claim to have known Robby Griffith. In my many encounters with him at Lawson McGhee Library, where he worked for a quarter century, he was always cordial and quietly efficient. I don’t think I ever said, “Hey, Robby,” […]

John Lahr’s new biography is called “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh.” It’s a pity Lahr chose that particular subtitle. Now, when I write my autobiography, I’ll have to come up with something else. The book’s a personal portrait […]

Here’s a coincidence. When I was naïve enough to think there might be a Metro Pulse still in publication in January, 2015, I made a note in my calendar to look into a column about President Obama’s traveling habits. For […]

Weathermen had predicted a white Christmas. It was almost cold enough. For days, the temperature never climbed out of the 30s, and then it got colder. But in Knoxville, all it did was rain, more than three inches on Christmas […]

This column has taken me a good deal longer to write than I expected. I told Gideon Fryer about a year ago that I could write a profile of him every year without repeating anything. One about people he’d known, […]

The Knox County Public Library’s new Knoxville history calendar, “Knoxville Remembered,” is out, featuring one rare photo for every month of the next year. Even in 2015, which at this writing is the Future, we can never escape our past. […]

Despite all the clichés–“that’s one for the books!”—sports history books are pretty rare, and don’t get read much. Even with a subject as popular as the Tennessee Vols, you could fit all the published pages about that team’s deep pre-TV-era […]