Editor’s note: This piece is a guest editorial from William Black, an organizer of the Pages & Places book festival in Scranton, PA, in October. Here he describes a number of other developments happening in his hometown. -KG

If you know Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the setting of NBC’s The Office—the U.S. version of Slough, the depressed and depressing overcast English city in which the Wernham Hogg Paper Company was doomed to eternally, if comically, fail—then your impression of the city is sunnier than the one most Scranton …

” A long time ago, things got broken here.”

“People got sad and left.”

“Maybe the world gets broken so we can have some work to do.”

“People think there aren’t any frontiers anymore. They can’t see that there are frontiers all around us.”

-Braddock, Pennsylvania

This is the script from a relatively new Levi’s commercial.

Video after the jump.

I’m excited to see Changing Gears, an NPR project about “Remaking the Manufacturing Belt” is up and running. Changing Gears aims to “report on a major developing story–the transformation of the Upper Midwest’s industrial-based economy to a post-manufacturing one. This transition is a turning point in the American economy with economic, social, environmental and cultural implications,” its web site states.
I had heard some rumblings about this project awhile ago so I’m glad to see it is off to a good start.
The project is “a product of the …

Best wishes to anyone trying to coral a community around bake sales, bingo tournaments,
scavenger hunts and silent auctions. Urbanites don’t want sticky bingo cards and scented
gift baskets. They want innovation and entertainment, which is why cities and non-
profits all over the country are embracing new events they hope will reinvigorate the
community, support local causes and grab national attention.
This shift has communities sending people over skyscrapers (safely, of course),
festooning trash into art and shooting objects from trebuchets. Hustling through mud and
geocaching are also favorites.
East Lansing/Lansing, Mich. is one region that’s been …

Next time you hear about Detroit having no national chain grocery stores, consider this post from Detroit blog Sweet Juniper. It highlights the city’s Honey Bee Market and its amazing food and people.
Here’s some of his description, “while Detroit may not have any national grocery chains, we do have more urban farms and gardens than any other city in America and we boast some of the best independent grocers around,” he writes.
“Honey Bee Market, so close to downtown, has become sort of the de facto supermarket for all types of …

Our readers know we love to beat up on Forbes magazine for their frequent lists of dead/ dying/ shrinking/ etc. cities.
But let me give credit where credit is due…this is a really interesting and cool interactive graphic that uses IRS data to show migration within the US, sorted by county. Good job on this one, Forbes!
Click on a county to see inward and outward migration and where residents moved to/ or from. I could spend a long time playing with this.
Thanks to a frequent Rust Wire reader, my Dad, for …

Check out the Great Lakes Law blog from The Great Lakes Environmental Law Center in Detroit.
Here, you can read information about how invasive species (Asian Carp), global climate change and more can impact the Great Lakes.
-KG

From Buffalo Rising: Read Urbanophile Aaron Renn’s pep talk to Buffalo.
(Though many people in Buffalo already know how cool it is!)
-KG

Editor’s note: This piece was contributed by Ivy Hughes, a Lansing, Mich.- based journalist. Read more about her on our contributors page. -KG

Five years ago my husband and I moved from Colorado to Michigan — by choice — for a job in the mortgage industry. We knew we were taking a huge risk, but at the time we had no idea we were venturing into a storm of opportunity we would have missed had we stayed in an economically thriving state.
Michigan is the underdog the media loves and …

It’s “the most important decision in history” and “the reasons why spew forth by the hour on ESPN’s LeBron Tracker, Deadspin and Esquire’s LeBron Watch, The Plain Dealer’s daily LeBron Rumors section, and the neighbor guy cutting his grass.”

But Scene magazine writer Vince Grzegorek says enough.

In an article titled “Let Him Go,” Grzegorek argues the groveling and the speculation and the posturing is hurting Cleveland’s image. Maybe more than “The King” ever helped it.

“LeBron in Cleveland validates our place on the map; LeBron anywhere else wipes us out,” he writes, “It’s sad, but no more so than our false belief that the guy ever loved us in the first place.”

To which he adds, hilariously, “even if LeBron departs, we’re stuck with ourselves.”