Since his 2012 mixtape, Straight From The Kur, the Mount Airy native has transformed his past experiences into emotionally raw music that has drawn an impassioned fan base.
Over the years, his fiery lyrics and hard-nosed delivery have become sharper, and his fan base and influence have grown. After striking hot with street anthems like “Peach Snapple” and an acclaimed release with 2024’s THURL, Kur has become a national mainstay.
The 31-year-old rapper, born Chauncey Ellison, continues the momentum with his new album ARD, released in late February.
Kur said the project, which stands for both the Art of Release and Discipline and a shortened version of alright, marks a return to form.
After 2025’s “Skip Da 8,” North Phjilly rapper Kur releases his newest album, “ARD.”
“I was super transparent and vulnerable when I first came out. I think as the years went on, I started to put a filter on and shut [fans] out from certain things,” he said. “I think that was a contradiction because people were actually supporting me because I was transparent. I tried to get back to it as much as I could on ARD.”
He’s peeling back the layers, letting fans in on his own personal struggles, in hopes that the two parties find a path of self-reclamation and healing.
“When you dig a little deeper, everybody has built up trauma that they’re not releasing. And I think that people don’t hear, ‘Yo, you will be alright or you will be OK.’ Somebody may not have anybody to tell them that they will be OK. I think just to see it may change their perspective. I’m coming from a healing point.”
We asked him about his perfect day in Philly. Here’s how he’d spend it.
10 a.m.
It’s different in the summer than the winter. If it’s summertime, I’m waking up and going to Kelly Drive, then stopping by Rita’sfor a mango water ice. Or, I’m going to get aPhilly Pretzel Factory.
Noon
I had to fall back on cheesesteaks, so I’m going to go to Bistro SouthEast on South Street. It’s not a heavy Philly staple, but that’s my kind of day in Philly.
2 p.m.
Look at clothes at Status andCreme on Second and Race Street. Or go to King of Prussia Mall. There’s also a place called Bullseye on 15th and Walnut Street. They have some good stuff in there. And there’s Common Ground[in Midtown Village] and [Center City’s] Lapstone & Hammer.
6 p.m.
I go to a smoothie truck in Fishtown and then I usually go to the studio. I’m telling you what I do, so I don’t want to make nothing up. I can’t lie.
3 a.m.
I leave the studio at 2 or 3 a.m. I go to Healthy Picks in Center City because it’s 24 hours. It’s the only place in Philly where you can get fresh fruit at 3 a.m. That changed my whole jawn. Nothing against Wawa, but when you go there and you get fruit, it isn’t really how you want it. To have a jawn where they chop it up and it’s fresh and super icy.
Philadelphia Museum of Art patrons will once again be able to decide for themselves what to pay at the gate Friday evenings.
The museum, eager to change the message to a positive one after a season of “drama and conflict,” will offer admission on a pay-what-you-wish basis every Friday evening for five months starting April 10.
Regular admission to the museum can be as high as $30 per ticket, and the initiative, announced Friday, recognizes that cost excludes or deters some visitors.
“We wanted to remove the barrier,” said museum director and CEO Daniel H. Weiss.
The program, dubbed “Independent Fridays,” coincides with the nation’s 250th celebrations and the opening of “A Nation of Artists,” an expansive, two-museum exhibition of American works at the PMA and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts built around the collection of Phillies managing partner John Middleton and his family.
The museum previously had pay-what-you-wish Friday evenings, but, because of the expense, canceled the program in summer 2024, when Sasha Suda was director. To underwrite its reinstatement, the museum put in place special funding from board chair Ellen T. Caplan and her husband, Ron, and the William Penn Foundation.
Caplan said that her own visits to the museum when she was growing up in Philadelphia happened through the pay-what-you-wish program, so to help fund it now “feels like a full-circle moment.”
Although the current funding underwrites pay-what-you-wish Friday evenings only through the Friday before Labor Day, leaders said it could continue.
“I’m hoping this will inspire others to underwrite it going forward,” Caplan said.
Daniel H. Weiss, director and CEO of the Art Museum, walks through museum galleries with staffer Laura Coogan (left) Jan. 7, 2026.
At the moment, the museum is planning to return to its regular half-off discounted rates on Friday evenings ($15 for general admission), after Sept. 4. Admission on the first Sunday of every month continues to be pay-what-you-wish, and anyone 18 years old or under is admitted free any day, any time.
The public signals coming from Philadelphia’s major, comprehensive art museum in the past several months have mostly been about a controversial name change and rebrand, and the acrimonious dismissal of Suda and the legal wrangling in its aftermath. After several months of calling itself the “Philadelphia Art Museum,” the institution has reverted to its previous, longtime name.
The museum’s dispute with Suda will be settled through arbitration, not through a trial with jury, a Common Pleas Court judge recently ruled.
Weiss said that reinstating pay-what-you-wish Friday evenings was partially about “turning the page. We want people to appreciate the museum for what it has been, not for the drama and conflict.”
Admission income is critical to the museum’s bottom line. In fiscal year 2025, earned revenue accounted for a third of the museum’s income, with the rest covered by contributed revenue, such as donations.
But it’s not clear that offering more pay-what-you-wish spots on the calendar will result in overall lower ticket income. The museum piloted the return of the Friday evening program for the final three weeks of its recent Surrealism show, and admission revenue came in 20% higher than in the previous three weeks.
In the same period, attendance received a boost of 128%, according to the museum.
Of the ultimate net effect of pay-what-you-wish on revenue, “Over the long-term we don’t know,” said Weiss. But, he added: “Having it underwritten allows us to not worry about that.”
Noel Mayo, 88, formerly of Philadelphia, widely recognized as the first Black owner of an American industrial design firm, first Black American college chair of an industrial design department, first Black industrial design graduate of Philadelphia College of Art, award-winning super mentor, and champion of professional diversity, equity, and inclusion, died Thursday, Jan. 29, of a probable heart attack at an assisted living center in Delaware County.
Rejected for an industrial design job after college because he was Black, Professor Mayo went on to found Noel Mayo Associates Inc.in Philadelphia in 1964. He spent 11 years in the late 1970s and ’80s as a professor and first Black chair of the industrial design department at what became the now-defunct University of the Arts, and 27 years, from 1989 to 2016, as a governor-appointed eminent scholar in art and design technology at Ohio State University.
“Dr. Mayo leaves behind a transformative legacy,” former colleagues at Ohio State said in a tribute,“whose impact shaped generations of students, elevated the field of design, and advanced diversity and inclusion across the profession.”
As the trailblazing owner and president of Noel Mayo Associates for decades, he and his staff designed all kinds of products, interiors, exteriors, graphics, mobile exhibits, and signage systems for companies and private clients around the world. He worked with NASA, IBM, Black & Decker, Philadelphia International Airport, museums, government agencies, and public institutions.
He collaborated with Lutron Electronics for 45 years and is named on hundreds of its design and utility patents. In 1984, he remodeled the mayor’s City Hall office after Wilson Goode replaced Bill Green. In 1988, he advised officials at the old Spectrum on the placement of a Julius Erving statue in South Philadelphia.
He designed computer-driven telephones in the 1980s that could dial 96 phone numbers automatically and leave messages. “I realize how pressured this is,” he told the Daily News for a 1984 story about design and technology’s effect on modern life. “But people want it.”
Professor Mayo was featured in a 1977 story by Inquirer design critic Ellen Kaye, and she praised the “visual fluidity” he created in a refurbished Bala Cynwyd high-rise condo. She wrote about his work again in 1978, and he said design “revolves around problem-solving from a logical point of view.”
In a 1995 story, Inquirer design critic Thomas Hine noted his commercial success with early light-dimmer switches and said it “helped Lutron to transform itself from a small manufacturer to an important name in its industry.” In a recent video interview, Professor Mayo said: “I see the problems as kind of opportunities that other people didn’t see. … So I look for opportunities for innovation.”
Professor Mayo was featured in The Inquirer in 1995.
As chair at Philadelphia College of Art and its successor, University of the Arts, he grew the industrial design department from the school’s ninth largest to its third largest. In online tributes, former students called him “a true icon” and “a doorway into a world of possibility, dignity, and community.”
He told The Inquirer in 1978: “Something looks good when it looks rational. That is how I work myself, and that is what I try to teach my students.”
At Ohio State, Professor Mayo taught product, interior, and graphic design courses, and researched accelerated learning processes using music, color, relaxation techniques, interactive computers, and video. Former colleagues there praised “his blend of rigor, generosity, calmness, and mentorship” in a tribute.
Professor Mayo worked hard to recruit Black and other minority designers and students to his company and college courses. He created mentoring programs and developed an extensive network of minority business contacts.
He was one-time president of the Philadelphia Economic Council and the Greater Philadelphia Community Development Corp. He wrote articles for many publications and served on boards at University of the Arts, the Society for Environmental Graphic Design, and other groups.
He was a fellow of the Interior Design Council of Philadelphia, a juror for art and design competitions, and a member of the Philadelphia Art Commission. Asked to advise young designers in the recent video interview, he said: “Try to be as innovative as you can. … Ask questions. … Being open is critical.”
Noel Mayo was born Dec. 30, 1937, in Orange, N.J. He attended a boarding school in Chester County and earned a bachelor’s degree in design in 1960 at what became Philadelphia College of Art and then University of the Arts.
Professor Mayo designed this exterior.
He married, divorced, and later married Leslie Butler.
Professor Mayo enjoyed roller skating, was good at darts, and earned an honorary doctorate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
“He was easygoing with a great sense of humor,” said Virginia Gehshan, a design colleague and longtime friend. “He was really an amazing genius. He was ahead of his time.”
In addition to his wife, Professor Mayo is survived by other relatives.
A celebration of his life is to be held later.
Professor Mayo received the Design Pioneer Award in 2019.
“They are definitely not just sitting there getting dusty in a room,” Hortz Stanton said.
In storage getting dusty?
Hortz Stanton said thousands of non-exhibited items in the Penn Museum’s collections found other purposes last year. And, 5,000 college students were able to use them for classes and research.
“A lot of things happen when objects aren’t on display, everything from conservation to research to documentation,” said Hortz Stanton.
Museums aim to protect their inventory, while still keeping items available.
The Museum of the American Revolution has a collection of 5,000 historical objects, such as archaeological material, documents, paintings, prints, and other items. But only about 300 items are on exhibit.
“They are not buried away and never to be seen again; we store all the collection here at the museum,” said Matthew Skic, director of collections and exhibitions. “Many of our documents are not on display because they are extremely light-sensitive, but we take them on rotations.”
George Washington’s headquarters flag, for example, was put out for a special exhibition in 2025. The display was short-lived due to the brittleness of the silk. It’s now back in storage.
George Washington’s Headquarters Flag (also known as the Commander-in-Chief’s Standard). This flag has been on display only twice at the Museum of the American Revolution.
They are not the only ones keeping a rotation of unexhibited items for preservation. The Independence Seaport Museum keeps 60% to 80% of its 10,000 items in storage throughout the year.
”People often will say: Why are you hoarding all this stuff?” said Peter Seibert, the museum’s president and CEO. “That’s not the case; we want to get them out, it’s just that sometimes that is not always possible.”
His museum has items as small as a thimble and as big as a submarine and the cruiser Olympia. Keeping textiles safe from moths and documents from crumbling requires proper conditions, including acid-free boxes.
Broadside advertising for Philadelphians to go to California in 1848. Handout: Independence Seaport Museum.
For less-fragile items, life can go places.
Museums often loan storage items to one another. Penn Museum, for example, recently loaned part of its collection to the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi.
This doesn’t mean Philadelphians have lost the chance of seeing those items.Philly museums have benefited from getting items from other institutions — such as the lunar module, which the Smithsonian lent to the Franklin Institute for 49 years. These days, however, lending contracts are much shorter, typically a year or two, Hortz Stanton said.
“Collections are not storage; they are a living resource,” said Paul Callomon, the Academy of Natural Science malacology collections manager.
He views the 21 million items in the academy’s collection as an active resource to scientists all over the world. His department, in particular, has the third-largest shell collection in the world, he said, as well as a variety of fish, plants, and microscopic algae that are not usually available to everyday visitors.
Ornithology collection manager Jason Weckstein sees the non-exhibited items being put to use daily.
”We make study skins, so we actually skin the bird, and we retain the skin and dissect the body,” he said. “We take tissue samples and take data on the internal organs of the body.”
Conservation matters
For years, Penn Museum had two large 14th-century Buddhist murals on display in its rotunda space, but construction forced them to be pulled down for their protection. What began as a precaution turned into a multiyear mural conservation project.
“Over time, things may crack or materials may weaken; our conservationists are able to stabilize this object so they can be stored safely or eventually reinstalled,” Hortz Stanton said.
The conservation process involves documenting the condition of the items, looking at what it needs for long-term care, cleaning, and taking measures to stabilize an object, said Skic.
How to access things in storage
The Academy of Natural Sciences and Penn Museum have many of their items cataloged in an online database. Researchers and students anywhere can request to see materials.
For Hortz Stanton, this conserves resources and protects fragile items.
”We are just one short part of the history of the things we are taking care of, a blip in time,” Hortz Stanton said. “The hope is that these objects are preserved for future generations.”
To make the items more available to the public, the academy holds a members’ night once a year. Animals, field books, photographs, and experimental projects not normally on exhibit become available for a night of knowledge.
Octopus not normally exhibited at the Academy of Natural Science. People can see it during members’ night.
Not a member? Callomon said anyone can tour the collection if they make arrangements.
“Bird clubs come for behind-the-scenes tours, and artists actually use our collection for bird field guides to study specimens,” Weckstein added.
The Museum of the American Revolution is also a bit more flexible with its collection, even granting access to descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers and people working on historical projects, Skic said.
“These items are tangible connections to America’s founding era,” Skic said. “They serve as a way to learn about those events and make sure people know these are real people, real events, and that those events continue to shape our lives today.”
One of the country’s most popular dance companies, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, is coming back to Philly this weekend, early in the company’s 20-city U.S. tour.
As of last summer, Ailey is led by Alicia Graf Mack, 47, who was a big star at Dance Theatre of Harlem and then the company she is now directing.
“I am very grateful to be back,” she said. “This year has been a very beautiful homecoming to a company that I love very deeply, and this organization has been part of my North Star since I was a child. [It’s been] part of my thought process about what I want to be when I grow up, and how I want to be, and how I want to express myself.”
Just before this, she was dean and director of the dance division of Juilliard School, where she worked closely with students and commissioned work for them to perform — including pieces by Philadelphia choreographers Rennie Harris and Matthew Neenan.
The tour coming to Philly this weekend also has a new Neenan piece, Difference Between.
“Matthew is someone that I’ve really admired for many years, and I know Matthew Rushing (Ailey’s associate artistic director) shares that same sentiment,” Graf Mack said. While working with Neenan at Juilliard, “I knew what a genius he is.”
Ailey is also bringing Jazz Island, a new work choreographed by Maija Garcia.
“It is a beautiful homage to Geoffrey Holder and Carmen de Lavallade,” both of whom made works for Philadanco. “Carmen basically cofounded this company with her best friend, Alvin Ailey,” Graf Mack said.
Alvin Ailey dancer Ashley Kaylynn Green.
Graf Mack was born in San Jose, Calif., and grew up in Columbia, Md., about 120 miles south of Philly. Her mother was a professor at Howard University and also a model.
“At home she would exercise and move to music to stay in shape,” Graf Mack said. “I would follow her, and she was kind of like, ‘Wow, she really picks up moves very easily.’”
So at 2 1/2, Graf Mack started dance classes, “and I found my home there.”
Eventually she and her sister, Daisha (who would become a commercial dancer performing with Rihanna, TLC, and Beyoncé), became serious ballet students.
In the summers, Graf Mack would study at New York’s School of American Ballet or the American Ballet Theatre.
“One summer, I participated in international ballet competitions. I went to St. Petersburg, Russia, competed in the Vaganova Prix, and placed in the finals,” she said. “I think I was the only American and certainly the only Black person there.”
Despite an impressive career, Graf Mack met with some roadblocks. Three years after she joined Dance Theatre of Harlem, she developed ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune disease affecting her joints.
So she looked at new careers. She applied and got into Columbia University.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
She studied history and for three years, interned at JPMorgan, with all intentions of working for a bank. That firm was involved in arts institutions, and Graf Mack said she found her niche.
“That kind of sparked my love for arts administration. But actually after I graduated, I was moving a little bit more, and I thought I should try to dance [again].
“It was Carmen de Lavallade who told me, ‘Alicia, you can work at a bank any time in your life, but your time to dance is now.’ So I went back to Dance Theatre of Harlem for a year, and that’s when the company closed. It left 40-some Black ballet dancers without work.”
For a year, she found freelance work with top companies such as Complexions, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, as well as celebrity gigs with the likes of Beyoncé, John Legend, Andre 3000, Alicia Keys, and Jon Batiste.
In 2005, she joined Alvin Ailey. Three years into her tenure, her illness flared up again.
So she went back to school to earn a masters in nonprofit management from Washington University in St. Louis.
But then Jamison, her former boss and lifelong idol, was retiring from Ailey and asked Graf Mack to dance at her final performance. Battle watched from the wings and wanted her back in the company. She returned for three more years.
In 2014, a back injury finally ended her performance career and started her arts administration career.
“I feel like I have a very lived history of the legacy of the company,” Graf Mack said. “I’m very grateful to now keep the legacy moving forward.”
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Feb. 27-March 1, Academy of Music. $36-$147. 215-893-1999 or ensembleartsphilly.org
Celeste Ng’s 2022 New York Times bestseller,Our Missing Hearts, is the 2026 One Book, One Philadelphia pick. The dystopian novel is about a 12-year-old biracial Chinese American boy and his quest to be reunited with his mother in an authoritarian America.
“I’m thrilled and honored,” Ng said Wednesday, speaking from her Boston study a few hours before she hopped on a plane to Philadelphia for Thursday’s announcement.
“I love community reads programs,” Ng said. “I relish in this idea that readers will have a shared experience, that they will be able to talk to each other, get to examine the world they are living in, ask if this is the world they want to live in, and figure out what they are going to do about it.”
“Our Missing Hearts,” by Celeste Ng. (Penguin Press/TNS)
In Ng’s 335-page paperback, a future America is living under the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act, where books are banned, voices are censored, and citizens are forbidden to criticize a government for its wrongdoings, especially its unfair treatment of people of color. People of Asian descent are particularly mistreated, considered scapegoats for a severe economic crisis.
Ng wrote Our Missing Hearts in 2020 during the pandemic when AAPI hate was at an all-time high. Years on, Ng’s PACT mirrors present-day America, where under President Trump’s executive order to “restore truth and sanity to American history,” historic panels honoring George Washington’s enslaved staff were removed from Independence Hall National Park last month.
(On Feb. 17, a federal judge ordered the panels to be restored, but the Trump administration appealed the decision and the return of the plaques to the park has been halted.)
“I sort of hoped the book would get further way from reality as the years went by, but that’s not the case so far,” said Ng, who stressed she’s not a psychic, just aware of history. “We are in a world where we just aren’t going to mention George Washington had enslaved people and we are taking down the gay pride [flag] at Stonewall, trying to pretend that none of this happened.”
Bird is the 12-year-old in the center of Ng’s book. His Chinese mother criticizes America through her poetry and art. She leaves Bird with his white dad, and continues to make public art that unites Americans and encourages them to speak out.
Celeste Ng attends Hulu Little Fires Everywhere Press Brunch at ROSS HOUSE on Feb. 19, 2020 in Los Angeles, Calif. (Photo by Erik Voake/Getty Images for Hulu/TNS)
“I feel like Philly is a living example of that,” said Ng, who was born in Pittsburgh and periodically visits Philadelphia. The Mütter Museum is one of her favorite places to visit. She’s keeping an eye on how the museum handles its collection of human remains.
“Philadelphians get to walk past history daily. There is art all around you, reminding you of the stories that form you and are a part of your lives. Philly is a space that can start connection through all of the beautiful sculptures and murals reminding us that change is possible.”
Our Missing Hearts is the Free Library’s 24th One Book, One Philadelphia pick. Last year’s choice was Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter’s 2023 memoir, The Upcycled Self.
The annual program urges Philadelphians to read the same book, fostering literacy and civic dialogue. The kick-off event is April 7. Ng will return to Philadelphia that day for a book signing and celebration. One Book ends May 28.
A series of events at Parkway Central and the 54 branch libraries will take place throughout the year.
“I hope the conversation will get people thinking, what do we lose when stories disappear,” Ng said. “What do we do if stories never get told? What happens when we intimidate people out of talking about the past and learning from it? I’m really grateful to the Free Library of Philadelphia for starting these conversations in this moment.”
South Philly’s Mark Abadi has had a way with word games since he was old enough to pick up a Scrabble board.
By 10, he would complete large-print mini games and crossword puzzles, and started playing Scrabble against his parents.
He became what he calls a “word nerd,” obsessing over newly-learned words and trying out new strategies in hotly-contested Scrabble battles at home.
“I could never compete with my parents,” he joked. His parents always matched his competitive spirit.
Eventually, he lost interest in the game until, at 15, he found his childhood Scrabble board and began playing again. Only this time, he had spent days studying the Scrabble dictionary, which made him better equipped to out-point his parents.
“I looked through the [dictionary] pages, and was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s a word? You can play ‘A‘ā’ because it’s a kind of lava? What?’”
Mark Abadi is one of several nationally-ranked Scrabble players in the country. He recently struck gold on the CW game show based on the iconic board game.
Abadi, a copy editor at Business Insider, found immediate inspiration reading the 2001 Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, a journalist who explored the underground Scrabble community and became an expert-level player. Soon, he’d follow Fatsis’ footsteps and become a nationally-ranked Scrabble player.
For nearly two decades, Abadi, 35, has competed in tournaments throughout the country. He’s won regional matches and scored top five finishes in world-class competitions, including the North American Scrabble Championship.
The Montgomery County native has continued to sharpen his skills by rubbing shoulders with other world-class players, many of who (like Abadi) are members of the Delco Scrabble Club.
“I casually hop on SEPTA and then I’m face-to-face with the best Scrabble players in the country. It’s kind of intimidating,” he said.
‘We’re waiting for you’
The Riddle Village dining room was pin-drop quiet on a recent evening, save for the occasional shaking of Scrabble tiles. The Delco Scrabble Club had gathered at the assisted living facility, where one of their oldest members lives, for their weekly meeting.
When The Inquirer got there, the members were halfway through their first of five 50-minute games.
Will Anderson, a 41-year-old national Scrabble champion, reached into the black drawstring bag suspended above his head and plucked a plastic tile. “We do this as a courtesy to our opponents,” he said, glancing at the bag. “So you aren’t doing any shenanigans when you’re drawing.”
Will Anderson picks his tiles from the bag while playing Scrabble during a Scrabble group meetup at Riddle Village in Media on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026.
Unlike Abadi, Anderson did not grow up playing Scrabble. He started as an adult, partly to break a World of Warcraft addiction. That was in 2009.
Since then, he’s won multiple tournaments and become an online Scrabble celebrity of sorts. After building an audience on Twitch, he turned to YouTube, where he currently has 70,000 subscribers and regularly posts “Scrabble History” videos detailing legendary games and players.
“It’s more growth than I ever could have imagined,” Anderson said. His online following even led to his day job as a content producer at Scopely, the mobile gaming company behind the Scrabble app.
In Riddle Village, Anderson was playing two games at once because the group had an odd number of players. “We call it good Will and evil Will,” said Samuel Moch, a top-10 player in Pennsylvania, also a club member. “And that’s appropriate because I’m playing good Will and I’m beating him.”
Meanwhile, “Evil Will” was facing Jeff Jacobson, a retired tuxedo salesman and another top player in the state, and winning.
Jeff Jacobson of Philadelphia (left) ponders his next move while playing Scrabble with Samuel Moch of Philadelphia (right) during a Scrabble group meetup at Riddle Village in Media on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026.
Anderson, who lives in Aston, said part of the reason Philadelphia is home to so many strong Scrabble players may simply be its size.
“You have a higher chance of these unusual hobbies in urban areas,” he said. Or perhaps, he added, the city’s competitive sports culture spills over into word games. “There could be something to that.”
The competitive scene also benefits from the fact that Scrabble is a universally known game. Almost everyone learns it at home, as did several members of the Delco Scrabble Club.
They grew up playing with friends and relatives, got so good that nobody around them could beat them, and began looking for tougher opponents.
“If you’re that person in your family,” Anderson said, “we’re waiting for you with open arms.”
Will Anderson (left) plays Joe Petree (middle) and Marty Fialkow (right) during a Scrabble group meetup at Riddle Village in Media on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026.
At the Delco Scrabble Club, it quickly becomes clear that Scrabble has more in common with chess than it does with word games.
“As a tournament player, you realize how deep and how beautiful the strategy of Scrabble is,” Anderson explained. “And in your pursuit of playing better and better, you leave the word game part of it behind and embrace it as a strategy game.”
Often, players don’t even know the definitions of the words they play.
Evan Chester, the fifth-best player in Pennsylvania and one of the top 50 players in the country, doesn’t know the definition of unaus, the word he had put down in the Riddle Village game. He knows it because he memorized the dictionary.
“But it’s a very useful and playable word,” said the 22-year-old.
“It’s a two-toed sloth,” said fellow club member Brendan McClanahan. Other club members, like de facto leader Ed Roth, who has been hosting the club at his house regularly for six years, nodded in agreement.
“Yup, two-toed sloth,” he said, as he laid down the word decrial.
A completed Scrabble game board during a Scrabble group meetup at Riddle Village in Media on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026.
Delco to TV
The Delco Scrabble Club is drawing the attention of national TV audiences. Abadi and Anderson are competing on CW’s Scrabble game show, hosted by comedian and former late-night show host Craig Ferguson.
Last summer, Abadi submitted an application to audition for the game show. And after meeting with the casting director, he was invited to compete in London for the show’s $10,000 prize.
Abadi scored a win last week and will advance to future episodes of the show.
“I put my fist up and clapped and everything,” he said. “I was way more peppy than I am in real life, to be honest.”
Anderson, who applied to audition after a show producer reached out to him on YouTube, won’t appear until the tail-end of the season in August. He was equally enthusiastic during his run.
“I kicked up the hooting and hollering far beyond my norm,” he said. And while he was nervous in the lead-up to the game, “when it came to actually playing Scrabble,” he said, “the muscle memory kicked in, and it just became fun again.”
A group of Mark Abadi’s friends, family, and Scrabble club members celebrate his win on the CW game show, “Scrabble.”
Anderson and Abadi signed NDAs preventing them from discussing their performance, but both said winning wasn’t their main goal. Abadi wanted to “have fun” and represent the Philly and Scrabble communities well, which he thinks he did. Anderson just hopes his appearance on the show is entertaining for viewers.
Through the show, Abadi is hopeful more people are drawn to the iconic board game. It’s not just a “vocabulary contest,” or a “game made for grandparents,” he said, adding there’s “something for everyone to appreciate about it.”
In 1683, the Concord arrived in Old City from Krefeld, an artisan community in Germany, with 33 people aboard, many of whom practiced the Mennonite and Quaker faiths.
America’s newest arrivals took the windy, wooded trail uptown, settling along the Lenape Great Road, what today is called Germantown Avenue, the Northwest’s main thoroughfare.
Mennonites are Anabaptists, Christians who are baptized as adults. And although Quakers aren’t, the two groups worshipped together in the home of settler Thönes Kunders at 5109 Germantown Avenue. Their shared belief in Christian pacificism and non-violence united them.
Here they drafted a petition that would become the public protest against slavery in British Colonial North America. Germantown’s history is rooted in this incident.
This historic protest will be remembered at Saturday’s firstival at the Historic Germantown Mennonite Meetinghouse. Each weekend in 2026, the Philadelphia Historic District is throwing a party in honor of America’s 250th birthday. The bashes mark events that happened in Philadelphia before anywhere else in America and often the world.
That is the original, restored 1688 Germantown protest against slavery. It’s on deposit at Haverford Colleges library’s Quaker collection. It had been missing for decades until discovered in a vault at Arch Street meetinghouse
Early Germantown settlers were familiar with European slavery. However, America’s version of chattel slavery, with its backbreaking labor, cruelty, and separation of families, went against Quaker and Mennonite religious beliefs, said Craig Stutman, a history professor at Delaware Valley University in Doylestown.
Historians believe this inspired Quaker friends and Mennonites — Garret Henderich, brothers Abraham and Dirck op den Graeff, and Germantown’s founder Francis Daniel Pastorious — to draft a petition‚ stating good Quakers must had to reject the brutal human trafficking. On April 18, 1688, the men signed the protest in Kunder’s home.
Artist Malachi Floyd said, “This piece commemorates the first public protest against slavery in America, recognizing the early courage to challenge injustice and advocate for human dignity. “
Pastorious, Hendricks, and the op den Graeff brothers took their petition to local Quaker meetings in Dublin, today’s Abington Friends; the Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting; and the annual meeting in Burlington, NJ. They wanted the Quaker hierarchy to acknowledge slavery was an evil practice that needed to stop.
Their pleas were swept under the rug because even in these early American Quaker circles, enslaved people were the backbone of the economy.
“Even people like Pennsylvania’s founder William Penn owned slaves and didn’t want to touch the political lightening rod,” Stutman said.
The rejection of the protest petition didn’t stop the fight.
In 1758, Quakers George Keith, Benjamin Lay, and Anthony Benezet, convinced Quakers to enact a law saying slaveholders could not be members of the Society of Friends.
“This was a first step in the direction of allyship with free and enslaved Black people who had long been fighting for freedom through slave revolts and cobbling together abolitionist societies,” Stutman said.
“And it was the foundation. So ultimately by the late 18th and early 19th century, Philadelphia would be a place where Black and white people worked together and fought against the institution of slavery, and where the enslaved came for freedom.”
A recent people of the Mennonite Meetinghouse in Germantown, 6119 Germantown Avenue.
The protest petition was lost in the Quaker archives sometime in the 1700s. It was rediscovered in 1844, when it was used by abolitionists to inspire a new generation of freedom fighters.
It currently resides at the Haverford Library Quaker and Special Collections.
This week’s Firstival is Saturday, Feb. 28, 11 a.m.-1 p.m., Historic Germantown Mennonite Meetinghouse, 6119 Germantown Avenue. The Inquirer will highlight a “first” from the Philadelphia Historic District’s 52 Weeks of Firsts program every week. A “52 Weeks of Firsts” podcast, produced by All That’s Good Productions, drops every Tuesday.
It rises and falls to the crescendo of the film’s emotional jazz riffs, matching the gravity of the civil rights struggle.
Proudfoot drops a cadre of never-before-seen black-and-white images of lawyer Jones’ backing King up, a display of Jones’ behind-the-scenes prowess. He was a speech writer and close friend of King’s.
But it’s the directors’ deft use of watercolor animations by Brazilian artist Daniel Bruson’s (Autism Goes to College) that brings a tenderness to Jones’ sometimes cynical, always cut-to-the-chase personality.
You see, Jones is that cat who, back in the day, stayed casket clean in sharp three-piece suits and sparkling Rolex watches. He’s that uncle who dared white men to tell him that he didn’t belong; that educated Black man who didn’t have time for racism. And it’s for that reason, King kept him in the background, but also in his ear.
Clarence B. Jones in an animated scene from “The Baddest Speechwriter of All.”
“I told Martin straight up,” Jones says in Baddest, answering Curry, who is making his directorial debut with the film. “Don’t put me near any demonstration. … If a white man puts his hands on me, they are going down.”
Three thousand watercolor images move seamlessly through Baddest narrating Jones’ life in a slow, jazzy rhythm. We watch him develop civil rights strategies with King and a coalition of like-minded Jewish people.
We are with Jones the night he matter-of-factly writes the first seven paragraphs of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably one of the world’s most important addresses. We watch King give the speech as Jones looks from the wings, surprised and in awe.
“I didn’t know he was going to read my words word-for-word,” Jones, 95, told The Inquirer in a recent video chat.
He closes his eyes often as he talks, punctuating his speech every so often with a well-placed, “You hear me?” or “You understand me?”
His hair is a short white Afro. Soft and defiant.
A wintertime soldier from North Philly
Jones was the only child of domestic workers, born in the 1300 block of Master Street, where Temple University’s sports complex stands today. Shortly after, his parents found work as live-in help at the Riverton, Burlington County, country estate of Edgar and Eleanora Lippincott, a Quaker family and part owners of a prosperous 19th-century Philadelphia-based clothing firm.
Clarence B. Jones before he received the American Jewish Congress’ “Isaiah Award,” on March 1, 2006, in New York.
“I lived there [with the Lippincotts] until they sent me to a Catholic boarding school [the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament],” Jones said. “I was raised by Catholic nuns who told me, ‘Master Jones, you are a good boy, Jesus loves you. You are beautiful.’”
The positive reinforcement turned Jones into a force, at a time when Black people’s education and career options were limited by racism. He finished Palmyra High School in New Jersey, the current home of the Clarence B. Jones Institute of Social Advocacy, at the top of his class. He attended the summer program at the Juilliard School in Manhattan for two years and studied clarinet. There he fine-tuned the musical ear that, he said, aided him in writing King’s speeches.
He graduated from Columbia University, did a brief stint in the Army, and graduated from Boston University Law School. By the late 1950s, he was working as an entertainment lawyer for Revue Studios, which was absorbed into what is now Universal.
Clarence B. Jones in an animated scene in his living room in “The Baddest Speechwriter of All.”
Jones was at home one evening in 1960 when his mentor and former New York judge Hubert T. Delany asked him to defend King, then a young preacher and budding Civil Rights Movement leader, against a tax evasion charge in Montgomery, Ala.
Jones said no.
“I wondered whether he [King] was real,” Jones said. “‘Cause I’m saying he [King] comes from a middle-class Black family. He didn’t have to do this. I come from the kitchen.”
Yet, he agreed after hearing King preach at a church in neighboring Baldwin Hills. Jones was struck by his sermon imploring educated Black people not to turn their backs on the struggle.
In 1963, King was jailed again. This time in for leading demonstrations, marches, and sit-ins against racial segregation in Birmingham, Ala. Jones smuggled out notes that King wrote to his fellow clergymen while incarcerated and compiled the missives into King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
That same year Jones worked with singer Harry Belafonte to secure $100,000 from the Rockefellers to bail Birmingham protesters out of jail. The Rockefellers asked him to sign a promissory note, that they later tore up. Jones references that promissory note in his draft of King’s speech.
“I was sharing a room with King in Albany, Ga.,” Jones told The Inquirer. “And he said, ‘Anybody can walk with me in the warm sunlight of an August summer. But only a wintertime soldier walks with me at midnight in the alpine chill of winter. You, Clarence, are my wintertime soldier.’”
How ‘Baddest’ came to be
Proudfoot and Curry met through a mutual friend in the late 2010s. A few years later, Curry helped produce Proudfoot’s 2022 Oscar-winning documentary The Queen of Basketball, the story of women’s basketball pioneer Lusia Harris.
Curry met Jones in 2022 when Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr invited Jones to speak to the team. Curry was intrigued with the elder statesmen’s stories and asked Proudfoot if he would be interested in working on a documentary about Jones’ life.
Stephen Curry, Clarence B. Jones, and Ben Proudfoot on the set of “The Baddest Speechwriter of All.”
“As a storyteller, I’m always interested in approaching well-known pieces of history through a fresh perspective,” said Proudfoot, a 35-year-old Nova Scotia native and two-time Academy Award winner. (Proudfoot’s credits also include the 2024 Netflix documentary The Turn Around, about Phillies superfan John McCann.)
“Clarence wasn’t just sitting there waiting for Dr. King to call him,” Proudfoot said. “He was a reluctant participant. He made a decision to live in comfort or live with purpose.”
Jones was King’s attorney until his assassination in 1968. In the late 1960s he became a partner at what is now Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt, making him the first African American partner at a Wall Street investment banking firm. During that time he also became the first Black person to become an allied member of the New York Stock Exchange.
During the 1970s, Jones served as the chairman of the New York-based Inner City Broadcasting, where he and Percy Sutton — once Malcolm X’s attorney — founded New York’s WBLS, the blueprint for today’s R&B radio stations. There, he also had a hand in developing the long-running variety show, . From 1971 to 1974, Jones was editor and publisher of the New York Amsterdam News.
“I’m telling you,” Jones said as a sly grin crawled across his face. “I was a bad man.”
In recent years, Jones has enjoyed a renewed spotlight.
He was featured in a 2024 Super Bowl commercial paid for by the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism. “I’d remind people that all hate thrives on one thing, silence,” he says, urging viewers to stand up to Jewish hate. President Joe Biden awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest civilian honor — in May that same year.
Clarence B. Jones visiting the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington in an animated scene of “The Baddest Speechwriter of All.”
Just days after the death of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Jones remembered Jackson as a leader in the civil rights struggle. “I looked upon Jesse Jackson as someone who was a warrior in the battle who has fallen,” Jones said. “I regard him with great love and affection.”
At a time when the historical civil rights language Jones had a hand in drafting is seen by this presidential administration as racist toward white Americans, Jones is reflective.
If people would focus more on love, perhaps America would be a better place.
“King’s work was about love,” he said. “The love he had for his work, for his people … the love he had for me.”
MILAN, Italy — A popular stop for Winter Olympics spectators when they’re not at a sporting venue is an opera house.
Teatro alla Scala, better known as La Scala, is one of the most famous ones in the world. Maria Callas rose to fame there; Franz Liszt’s piano is in its museum. The opera house, which opened in 1778, is the heart of Italian opera.
And it may feel especially familiar to visitors from Philadelphia: La Scala was the inspiration for the city’s Academy of Music.
The Great Stages Gala reception honoring Marian Anderson was held on the Academy of Music stage in Philadelphia on Saturday, June 8, 2024.
In 1854, a building committee invited architects to submit plans for an opera house in Philadelphia, John Francis Marion wrote in his book, Within These Walls: A History of the Academy of Music. The next year, the committee chose Napoleon LeBrun and Gustav Rungé to design what would become the Academy. LeBrun was sent to Milan to sketch La Scala just four months before ground would be broken on Broad Street.
From the outside, the two buildings look very different.
La Scala is somewhat modest because there were originally homes across the street that a grander building would overwhelm. The Academy of Music was also designed humbly, in the Rundbogenstil (round arch style), inspired by Runge’s German roots, reserving most of the budget for the interior.
Inside both buildings, a red-and-gold-tiered jewel box of an auditorium awaits.
“It’s kind of like an event to go to La Scala,” said Philadelphia Ballet artistic director Angel Corella, who famously danced Romeo and Juliet with Alessandra Ferri in that opera house in 2000. (Their performance was filmed for TV and is available on YouTube.)
“People would go just to see anything, pretty much [at La Scala] because it’s not only the event to go to see ballet or hear opera and see opera,” Corella said, “but it’s also the fact that you’re going to an opera house that has so much history in it.”
Francine Garino, a La Scala tour guide who coaches opera singers in French pronunciation, agrees.
“Some people don’t know anything about opera or ballet. They don’t mind. They want to live this experience.” Sometimes they will leave after the first intermission, saying they feel fulfilled just having experienced the theater.
Philly’s version, which opened in 1857, is equally beautiful but less imposing.
“The great thing about the Academy of Music is that it’s still a big opera house,” Corella said, “but it feels very intimate and close to you when you’re on stage. So it’s a perfect theater.”
The outside of La Scala, the world-famous opera house in Milan, Italy, is fairly humble. But the inside reveals a red-and-gold tiered jewel box. The Academy of Music was designed after La Scala.
Horseshoe shapes and other similarities
The similarities between the two theaters lie “in the position of the theater, the position of the seats, the acoustics,” Corella said.
LeBrun and Rungé replicated La Scala’s horseshoe-shaped seating areas, but they closed it up more for better sight lines.
Like the Academy, La Scala has a huge central chandelier. But the Italian theater is a neoclassical design and somewhat grander than the Philly version. It has six levels above the orchestra to the Academy’s four.
The Academy has more seats (2,800 in Philadelphia and 2,030 in Milan), thanks to its full mezzanine and balconies with boxes on the sides.
The outside of the Academy of Music was designed to look like a marketplace.
At La Scala, the first four levels above the orchestra are made up of lots of small individual boxes that were originally purchased by members of the aristocracy.
They were said to be more expensive than buying an apartment and owners would decorate the boxes as they wished. They’d bring in servants and could come any time they wanted. Here, they’d take business meetings, eat dinner, and go down to where the orchestra seats are now and dance to the music.
“If you owned a box,” Garino said, “it was home for you.”
Today all seats are individually sold as in any theater, with prices going from €10 to €300. Fans stalk the website to buy tickets as soon as they go on sale. They sell out extremely quickly.
La Scala was damaged when it was bombed during World War II.
Paul Miers lowers the chandelier to clean it and replace light bulbs on May 29, 2024, at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. The large crystal chandelier measures 16 feet in diameter and weighs 5,000 pounds.
Rake vs. no rake
At the time the Academy of Music was built, there were similar academies in other American cities.
“There was an Academy of Music in New York that predated the Metropolitan Opera. The Brooklyn Academy of Music was something that was founded in 1859, inspired by what we had done,” said Ryan Fleur, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Ensemble Arts, which runsthe Academy of Music.
Brooklyn Academy of Music’s original building burned down and was replaced by a Broadway-style theater.
Because of that, “the Academy of Music is truly unique,” Fleur said. “As far as I know, it not only is an oldest continuously operating Opera House [in the country], but it’s the only opera house that still has this configuration of spaces.”
For American dancers, La Scala, and most European opera houses, are a challenge, because they have raked stages. The stage slopes downhill from back to the front, improving the view for audiences.
The Academy is “a perfect venue” for Philadelphia Ballet, said Corella. “Because all the ballets, especially the [older full-length ballets], fit incredibly well, because it’s almost like a continuation from the house into the stage.”
In the United States, he said, the rakes have been fixed and made flat.
“In Europe, there’s a lot of theaters that are still in rake. For the dancers, it’s great for jumping, because when you going down the hill, you feel like you’re flying … but it’s much harder for turning.”
La Scala Ballet étoile Nicoletta Manni thinks the opera house she regularly performs on is the best of both worlds.
“In La Scala, we have a good rake,” Manni said. “It’s not too much. It’s very good for jumps, because it’s helping us to jump even higher. You have to be careful with turns, because you might lose your balance, but you just need to get used to it.”
This month, Manni, 34,
was chosen to be an Olympic torch bearer. Then, she was told she would be the last one and would light the cauldron.
“It’s history, and so being there and have the privilege of doing that was very [much] something to remember. I will have it in my memory forever.”
Another thing she’d like to do is dance on our side of the Atlantic.
