Ma Crow is a small woman with tiny hands and feet and long, thick strands of dark, wavy hair that she wears caught up in a comb on one side of her face. When you look at her sometimes you can see cl  

This isn't for you. This is for all those thugs who blast on cops, devalue life and generally act like fools. This is for Dante "Pretty Boy" Person, who made the front pages for shooting Cincinnat  

For the past few weeks CityBeat, like many media outlets, has taken a look back at the highlights and lowlights of 2005. But that's too easy. The hard part is figuring out what's going to happen in  

I have always thought my decline began in earnest about 12 years ago when I had a gig with a Bluegrass band at a Northern Kentucky country club. I drove over in a wet winter twilight with zero visib  

Like sexuality, like God and patriotism, like voting and like getting to Cuba from America, the death penalty is complicated. Complicated in theory, not difficult when enacted. It's easy to flip a  

What would any Christmas season be -- or any week, for that matter -- without bitching and moaning from political right-wingers about some vast liberal plot to eradicate their very way of life? It'  

Change has come, not quietly, the way you hope it would, like Sandburg's "little cat feet." Instead it's come in the roar of hurricanes and natural disasters, erupting volcanoes, tsunamis. Our diffi  

Mark and Eric sittin' in a tree, t-r-a-d-i-n-g. Second comes senate, first comes mayor, then comes us maybe havin' a prayer. Right now Alicia Reece is somewhere tying off David Pepper. And I can't  

So I'm pushing my young son in his stroller the other night on a dark Clifton street, easing along with several hundred others in our neighborhood's annual fall lantern walk. Behind me I hear a voi  

"The weatherman's a'runnin' with the dry cows," Moon Mullins used to say on dreary winter afternoons in 1977 and 1978, when the temperatures went to 25 below zero two years in a row. Those were a co  

I knew of Mark Mallory when we were two nobodies very outside the arena of public opinion and scrutiny -- both, I think, scrapping to escape the long shadows of overachieving older siblings to find   

Election Day is less than a month away. Are you prepared to vote? Cincinnati residents, in particular, have dozens of candidates to learn and tons of information to digest before Nov. 8. But suburb  

When Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29, I wasn't anywhere near the Gulf Coast. I was at home in air conditioning watching it on television, cable news, 24/7. My friend Wayne thought this natural dis  

"I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset." -- "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Langston Hughes I h  

The images from New Orleans and Mississippi were horrible the week after Hurricane Katrina struck: old people slumped in wheelchairs, babies in dirty diapers and everyone else in between, almost al