CATEGORY
City Infrastructure Project
Mobility in Crisis, Part III: Can Amtrak Midwest Ride Out the Pandemic?
The pandemic has halted progress for public transit systems nationwide, but Amtrak’s Director of Government Affairs for the Midwest discusses why the region was struggling with passenger rail long before COVID-19 and how we might move forward.
Mobility in Crisis, Part II: Could Disaster Transform Toledo’s Bus System?
Read Part I, "Public Health, Transit and Investment," here.
COVID-19 has decimated public transportation in cities nationwide;...
Mobility in Crisis, Part I: Public Health, Transit and Investment
From airlines to subways, mass transit is particularly ill-suited to the social distancing practices that help stem COVID-19’s spread, so it doesn’t come as a shock that the transportation sector has struggled to navigate the pandemic. And for transit systems nationwide, it’s a bitter pill to swallow: where public transportation was most successful, it now seems most threatening—and threatened.
20/20 Vision: The Ambition & Execution of “Comprehensive Planning” in Toledo
If you made it past the front page of The Blade in mid-May, 2000, you might have spotted a curious advertisement. Among...
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Think
Charity Appeal: Celebrity Influence in Times of Crisis
It might seem counterintuitive that entertainment and cultural icons thrive during tremendous times of hardship, but history has proven it true.
Art
Entropic Peace in Isolation: Revisiting Yayoi Kusama’s Fireflies on the Water in 2020
The Toledo Museum of Art exhibition program brought together a special presentation of Yayoi Kusama’s Fireflies on the Water installation, just for a global pandemic to hit soon after. Despite what seemed to be a major set-back, COVID-19 has instead transformed Fireflies on the Water into a deeper reflection into what isolation and the individual mean in the chaos of 2020. What was once an incomprehensible escapist dream is now a sober dissolution into universal existentialism.
The Voting Project
The 2020 Election Dilemma: How Ohio has Handled Voting During the Pandemic
The 2020 presidential election stands to be one of the most complex and highly anticipated U.S. elections in recent history, primarily because...
Stories
Toledo ABCs
Toledo ABCs is a mini-series that highlights, from A to Z, just a sampling of those aspects that make Toledo unique and, in some cases, world-renowned. Designed to be viewed individually or as a set, the graphics use archival images, photography and white space constrained by typeface outlines to memorialize the beauty and significance in what we often might see as mundane.
Books
Sustained Outrage in the Fight Against the Opioid Epidemic: A Review of Death in Mud Lick
Pulitzer-prize winner Eric Eyre’s new book exposes how hard drug distributors work to keep eyes off of their numbers and how important it is for journalists to keep looking. In the small towns of America, it can literally mean life or death. The opinions expressed in this series are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect any official organizational stance. Cover graphic by Ruth Chang for Midstory.