The Loveever Blog

The yellow triangle sits at the center of the chest, the kind of triangle you see on a wet floor sign or a high-voltage panel. Inside it, a hand is crossed out with a diagonal slash. Above and below, in blunt capital letters: NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH. The lettering is warning-sign lettering—condensed, utilitarian, the… Continue reading The Caution Triangle as a Boundary: Reading the ‘Not Friendly Do Not Touch’ Shirt

The shirt is not subtle. Across the chest, in letters that wrap around the design like a fence around a raised bed, it reads: LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. Inside that ring of text sit four root vegetables — a carrot, a radish, a beet, and an onion — each… Continue reading The Two Meanings of Rooting: Reading the Smiling Vegetables on a Garden Shirt

The notebook cover is a rectangle of black-and-white speckle, the kind of mottled pattern that looks like static or granite or the inside of a marble composition book. Down the left edge runs a dark binding strip. Inside the white ruled label, the word COMPOSITION sits at the top, and below it, outlined in thin… Continue reading The Composition Notebook as Costume: What a Printed Cover Asks of the Person Wearing It

The fluorescent tube above the kitchen sink in St. Bridget’s basement had been flickering for three weeks. Nobody called the archdiocese about it. Everyone assumed someone else had. That was the kind of room this was — things got noticed but not always fixed, and the noticing itself counted as care even when the follow-through… Continue reading The Line on the Form That Asks Whether Your Name Is Safe to Print

The folding chairs were already in rows when I got to the basement of Greater Mount Calvary Baptist Church on a Tuesday evening in late March. The radiator along the east wall ticked and hissed. Someone had set up a metal folding table near the back with a Mr. Coffee machine, a sleeve of Styrofoam… Continue reading What the Person Taking Minutes Knows That the Chair Does Not

Resilience gets talked about as a community’s ability to bounce back after a shock. But in the neighborhoods I’ve spent years watching, resilience rarely looks like a dramatic recovery. It looks like a neighbor who keeps a spare key for the elderly woman two doors down. It looks like a handwritten sign taped to a… Continue reading Why the Most Resilient Communities Are the Ones With the Strongest Informal Networks

There is a particular kind of meeting that happens in neighborhood halls and church basements, where a person with a clipboard and a grant proposal stands up and says, “We have a solution for your community.” The phrase itself is a small wound. It assumes the community is a problem to be solved, a blank… Continue reading The Problem With Outsiders Coming In With Solutions for Communities They Do Not Belong To

Local journalism doesn’t die in a single dramatic moment. It comes apart in the small, repeated choices made inside newsrooms: which meetings get covered, which beats get cut, which assignment editor is told to stop sending reporters to zoning board hearings because the clicks are too low. This is the informal infrastructure of local news—the… Continue reading How Local Journalism Dies One Assignment Editor at a Time

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a community meeting when someone pulls out a notebook. It is not always hostile. Sometimes it is curious, sometimes wary, sometimes simply tired. I have learned to sit with that silence before I write a single word. Because the meeting did not begin when I… Continue reading Why You Should Show Up to the Meeting Before You Write About the Meeting

I learned this the hard way, on a rainy Tuesday in a church basement that smelled of coffee and old carpet. I’d come to cover a neighborhood association meeting, notebook ready, expecting the kind of drama that writes itself—a zoning fight that had been simmering for months. But the showdown I’d penciled into my mental… Continue reading The Room Knows Who Was There: Why You Have to Sit in the Folding Chairs Before You Write a Word