One of the things you're sure to hear about if you read up on Nashville is a local dish called "Nashville hot chicken," a local culinary specialty. To listen to people talk about it, you'd think eating Nashville hot chicken was some kind of ancient local religious rite. In fact, Nashville hot chicken appears to be a dish of fairly recent provenance. According to the Wikipedia entry for it: Anecdotal evidence suggests that spicy fried chicken has been served in Nashville for generations. The current dish may have been introduced as early … [Read more...]
Archives for June 2018
Lone Star Carpetbagger
I subscribe to Jeff Wood's must read Overhead Wire daily newsletter. Today I clicked on a link that looked interesting called "Making Dallas a Desirable Place to Live." Looking at the byline, I was not surprised to see that it was written by Patrick Kennedy, who seems to write every other piece I come across on Dallas. Kennedy is a fascinating fellow whom I met once a few years back. This blog post isn't really a profile of him but rather a sketch of why I think he's someone who ought to have a proper analysis done. Kennedy is a classic … [Read more...]
The New Basis of City Diplomacy
I was in Chicago last week for the Chicago Forum on Global Cities. One of the panels I was looking forward to seeing was about city diplomacy. People have been talking for a while about cities conducting their own foreign policy. But it was very clear at this forum that in the United States at least, the entire basis of that idea has shifted radically in a very short period of time. Here, for example, is an article in the Chicago Tribune about the topic in advance of the 2015 edition of the Chicago Forum: It's one example of an … [Read more...]
Kwame Kilpatrick’s 28 Year Prison Sentence Is Unfairly Long
A recent article noting that former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick had been transferred between prisons, combined with rumors that President Trump might commute the sentence of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich made me think about the fairness of Kilpatrick's 28 year prison sentence. According to a 2016 article from the Washington Post, only one other person has ever been sentenced to more than 20 years for political corruption. In fact, they only list four that got more then 15 years and they seem to involve extreme cases, like Rita … [Read more...]