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Everyone wants to fit in

By Mark Wilmoth In The Whisper Test, Mary Ann Bird tells about her childhood: “I grew up knowing I was different, and I hated it. I was born with a cleft palate, and when I started school, my classmates made it clear to me how I looked to others: a little girl with a misshapen lip, crooked nose, lopsided teeth, and garbled speech. “When schoolmates asked, “What happened to your lip?” I’d tell them I’d fallen and cut it on a piece of glass. Somehow it seemed more acceptable to have suffered an accident than to have been born different. I was convinced that no one outside my ...

More place names

It’s the middle of winter. Two more months of cold, dreary weather, but not to worry - days are getting longer. Here’s an easy, cost effective cabin fever relief idea: take a drive on local roads. You will see signs for towns, streets, and points of interest. As pointed out in an ...

A deeper look into injection wells quells the surface-level misinformation

By Daniel McKenzie Injection wells on the surface are easy to miss, just a pipe and a bunch of knobs. Beneath that simple exterior lies an intricately designed and heavily regulated engineering feat that you can’t see. Critics lob surface-level objections, missing the real story underground. Ohio is uniquely suited for this kind of drilling. Beneath our feet lies a geological setup so ideal that even the harshest skeptics would have to admit nature handed us a win. Thick sandstone, solid shale, and deep, stable formations create an underground structure tailor-made for safely storing ...

MOV Climate Corner: Mountaineers deserve better

“Data Centers and bitcoin mines are remaking rural America the same way coal once did. They move into weak regulatory terrain, rewrite the rules in their favor, drain the resources that communities rely on and send the value somewhere else.” This quote is from a piece in Salon titled “Data centers are West Virginia’s new strip mines: The Mountain State is experiencing a data center boom—and using the old coal playbook” by Sean Carlton. I read the piece recently on Facebook, where it was shared by Tucker United – a group of Tucker County residents and their supporters ...

A quarter century of technological improvements has changed our world

We reached a milestone a few days ago. We are now in the second quarter of the 2000s. There was a time, not that long ago (1999) that we were worried that all the computers in the world would quit when the calendar moved from 99 to 00. Well, they didn’t, and many people are now ...

MOV Climate Corner: Reimagining economic development in the Mid-Ohio Valley

At a recent meeting of the Marietta Area Chamber of Commerce, I posed the following question to Brian Chavez, who represents the 30th Ohio senate district and is chairman of the Ohio Senate Energy Committee: “What economic benefit does the injection-well industry (which pumps millions of barrels of production waste from hydraulic fracturing) present to Washington County, and how would you assess the economic cost/benefit ratio of this industry for our region?” Since Mr. Chavez did not really answer my question, I attempted to answer it at the Dec.18 meeting of the Washington County ...