Jay Stowe

Grilling is a craft, a calling. It’s utterly elemental, tapping into the Olduvai Gorge of the mind. It begins with a fascination with fire.

As Balkanized as this city can sometimes seem, there’s one thing all Cincinnatians can agree on: where you went to high school is a big deal.

The steam may not have set in yet, that riverine stickiness that settles like a gargantuan ball of cotton candy on the Ohio Valley each summer. But you know it’s coming.

It was a scramble getting this issue out the door, but then some months are like that. Actually, most months are like that.

Google the words “Camp Coryell” and a small world opens up. Or maybe rabbit hole is a better word for it.

Staring at a blank page is no one’s idea of fun, least of all a writer. But it’s what we do here at the magazine every month.

Another year, another knock-down-drag-out presidential election season.

Every year we do a Best of the City list, and every year we face the same challenge: How do we top last year’s? It’s a big
challenge that we take seriously, devoting ourselves to hours, even days, of careful, quasi-scientific study. We go deep.

You love pizza. Always have. Ever since the days when you and your friends rode bikes up to the Montgomery LaRosa’s and plunked down your hard-earned grass cutting money for a medium pie, a plate of pizza bread, and a pitcher of Pepsi.

We live in fractious times. Endless war, economic stagnation, and political stalemate are the watchwords now. But no matter how frustrated, despondent, and angry all of this may make us, it is important to keep in mind that we are still a young country, that we've seen harder times and been through worse, and that our brainpower even more than our brawn is what has enabled us to leap over whatever hurdles history—or our own hubris—has set in our path.