“At 1 a.m. / we go for gold / At 1 a.m., when we / we lost control / At 1 a.m., oh yeah / goddamn, goddamn / we don’t / want to gooooo home,”…
The Olympics of Pizza
Pizza. Booze. Competition. I love these things, unabashedly and without shame or hope of absolution. So when my friend Dennis had the inspired idea to combine them, I immediately jumped on board. “The Pizza Olympics…
Vanishing Point
For Chad Cochran it starts in the countryside, in the village of Fredericktown, Ohio, where he was born amongst the farms, that seemingly endless stretch of pastoral Middle America spiraling outward from Columbus. He grew…
Can We Help You with That?
Do you have trouble waking up in the mornings for workouts? Do you hate getting into a cold car for the trip to the gym? Nothing clean and fashionable to wear to that fitness class?…
Got Digital Game?
My jumper is wetter than a champagne-soaked championship party in a locker room. Splash, splash, splash. I’ve got my eyes open to see the results, but I could close them and know the shots are…
Viva Pickleball
It sounds like a bizarre, arcane game you made up with your friends on a lazy summer afternoon, which is appropriate because that’s pretty much what happened. Pickleball – a combination of badminton, tennis and…
A Timeless Game
There’s an intense match in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Columbus Table Tennis Club, the furious volleys on display like a three-dimensional broadcast to the parking lot of the University City Shopping Center….
Livestrong & Prosper
Doug Ulman attended the inaugural Pelotonia ride six years ago, along with his colleague and friend Lance Armstrong, who spoke at the opening ceremony. Ulman didn’t participate; he just watched. He continued to observe during…
Who’s the Woman in the Red Dress?
I’m surrounded by the woman in the red dress, yet I have no idea who she is. She leers from couches, averts her eyes from behind the wheel, walks away down the street. Her world…
Nancy Kramer: Founder and Chairman, Resource/Ammirati
Nancy Kramer was an early believer in the transformative power of personal computing. Her ad agency pioneered interactive digital marketing before that meant anything to the masses, and her team of in-house technologists created the…
Stephen Snyder-Hill: Major, U.S. Army
The first impact hit to his right. A cinematic collision of metal and sand, of explosives and earth, a blue and orange fireball swirling in the darkness, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The…
What’s the Big Idea?
Hundreds of people pack into the Capitol Theatre to see Ruth Milligan and Nancy Kramer, but the two women didn’t really want to be here. They are tired, exhausted, and they flat out tell the…
TEDXCOLUMBUS: Decoding the Language of the Brain
On June 23, Ian Burkhart picked up a spoon, briefly, and then dropped it. It was the biggest moment of the last four years of his life—Burkhart is paralyzed. Now he’s regaining the use of…
TEDXCOLUMBUS: Marshmallows, Voodoo Dolls, and Violent Crime
Brad Bushman has a drawer full of Clif bars in his desk, just in case. It’s not a diabetes quick-fix, but it does have to do with blood-sugar. It’s about aggression and self-control. It’s about…
TEDXCOLUMBUS: The Problem with Finding the Cure
On behalf of the greater scientific good, Jessica Winter welcomed the biggest problem she could find. And then the problem became hers. She’s a researcher and professor at Ohio State in biomedical engineering, and she…
TEDXCOLUMBUS: The Future is Now, and Friendly
Drones—that’s the most common manifestation of robots in our culture. At best, delivering trinkets from Amazon in a way that makes the online-only retail monolith even less human; at worst, showering death from the skies…
TEDxColumbus: How to Teach like an Artist
Cindy Foley’s daughter sees art when she looks at mud. On the massive screen behind her, Foley projects a kindergarten worksheet, which shows a picture of an amorphous blob with a space below for children…
Wonder Dogs
When he was seven years old, Joel Wilcox of Blacklick became one of the estimated 2.2 million people living with epilepsy in the U.S. It’s a life-changing diagnosis, but the most drastic shift for Joel…
Fast food from the farm
Todd Mills wants you to eat better. Like farm-to-table fresh, Whole Foods, organic better. And he wants to serve it to you through a drive-thru window. After unveiling his first brick-and-mortar restaurant on High Street…
No Grand Plans
A lot has changed since 1992. People bought CDs then, lots of them. Nirvana was the biggest musical act in the world. People read album reviews in Rolling Stone and Spin magazines. The Internet, for all…
EXERCISE YOUR FACE OFF!
Tech gadgets are great and getting better all the time, but some new inventions probably should have died on the drawing board – for example, the Shake Weight. Sometimes it seems like the devices are…
Better Sweating through Technology
Your smartphone can tell you how to get where you’re going, what music to listen to and how to cook, so it was only a matter of time before it told you how to work…
Body by the Numbers
As I put on the tight, elastic swim trunks in the changing room in Baseline Fitness, I realize I have never worn Speedos before. I am not a fan. It’s not so much the look…
How to get Elected in 11 Easy Steps
So you want to run for public office, to really make a difference in this community, to devote yourself to the principles of civic service upon which our nation was founded? Are you inspired by…
Three-Eight Charlie, Where are you?
Something seemed amiss as Jerrie Mock flew toward runway number five at the Cairo airport on the edge of the desert. It was only a vague sensation, so she guided her single-engine Cessna 180 –…
A Legacy Continues
J Rawls was prolific. He rapped, produced, and collaborated on well over a dozen albums during the course of a 14-year career, shifting stylistically from hip-hop to soul to jazz. He worked with Mos Def,…
Everything is Illuminated
It’s gray, the first overcast chilly day of October, but it’s bright inside Lumos Columbus, all white walls and blonde wooden floors. Brian Yetzer waits near the south wall of the Short North gallery with…
Dream Small
Are you in an aspiring band? Superdreamer Records cofounders Spencer Morgan and Eric Gussler want to know what you won’t do to make it big. Won’t play a certain venue? Great. Refuse to create band…
A Quiet Summer Before the Storm
Two words have overshadowed all else this offseason for the Columbus Blue Jackets – Ryan. Johansen. Last year, the 22-year-old breakout center played all 88 games and amassed 35 goals and 34 assists to lead…
Pitch Perfect
Rosemary Garry and Lucas Williamson had problems. Garry struggled to coordinate meeting times with Columbus businesspeople; Williamson kept breaking MacBook chargers. They created very different product-based companies to solve these problems, but they had a…
Paint the Town Red (and blue, and green, and yellow)
When Katie Barron was young, she shunned coloring books filled with simple cartoons and vector illustrations, opting instead for more intricate ones bursting with mosaics and art nouveau designs, which her grandmother gave her. “I…
Wheelchair Assassins, a Rehab Clinic, and the Infinite Imagination of an 11-Year-Old Boy
The project, titled “Brickjest” and displayed in more than 100 photos on www.brickjest.com, is the work of Kevin and Sebastian Griffith, a father and son from Columbus. The pair spent five to six months creating…
Sim City
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A For the uninitiated, the series of commands above is indecipherable nonsense, but it’s immediately recognizable to gamers as the renowned “Konami Code,” the sequence of…
Triumph of The Spirit
On a cable car in San Francisco, Matt Vasquez screams lyrics while drummer Brandon Young hits a trashcan lid, and the unsuspecting trolley riders around them observe, bemused. The scene is from a performance video…
Hangover Easy(er)
A small part of me secretly likes hangovers. There’s something appealing about the idea that if you enjoy excess* then you should feel some pain. Otherwise, what’s to stop everyone from partying constantly? Remove hangovers from…
Back to the Future of Food
Where does your food come from? No, not the grocery store – those sprinklers in the produce aisle aren’t for growing vegetables. Where does it originate? This wasn’t a very difficult question 70 years ago….
Eat Your City
When you think of dining out, you probably don’t think of a farm. The juxtaposition is striking – white tablecloths, the din of the kitchen, mood lighting, and the laughter of patrons, versus bucolic settings,…
Much Ado About Mustard
Jarmo Kekalainen sits in his posh, orderly office in the suite level of Nationwide Arena, the nerve center of the Blue Jackets front office operation. It’s a mere two and a half weeks before the…
Life After Bourbon
A bourbon barrel is something like a living piece of art, part paintbrush and part canvas. It’s active in the distillation process, infusing color, character, and flavor into the whiskey, and it’s also a work of…
The Changing Face of High Street
Clay Lowe first set out to tell the story of Columbus’s High Street corridor for WOSU-TV in 1972. He arrived fresh from the bucolic Georgia countryside to begin his teaching position with Ohio State’s now-defunct…