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 […]

Norris Dryer died on Thursday, after several years of faring the unpredictable weather of one of the more dire forms of cancer. We should be thankful to the fates that they allowed him to witness Game 7 of one final […]

That bluesy old old piano song has a name that always makes people laugh. First recorded in May, 1930, by East Knoxville singer Leola Manning, it’s better known now than it was then. Just in the last 20 years, it […]