Amid a historic drop in violent crime, homicides have fallen to lows not seen in decades. But in what researchers say is an alarming trend, homicides related to domestic violence are on the rise.
There were 37 such killings in Philadelphia last year, up from 28 the previous year. And even as homicides have fallen sharply overall, domestic killings remain stubbornly intractable. In all, deaths related to domestic violence accounted for about one in six homicides in the city last year, records show.
To address that, the police department is adding specialized training for officers and others who deal with victims of such crimes and adding staff in its Office of Community Advocacy and Engagement. When the unit expands this spring, staffers will be trained to spot signs of domestic abuse and advocate for victims of intimate partner violence, among other crimes.
That work mirrors efforts in cities such as New York, which launched a new police unit last year dedicated to combating the surge in domestic violence as such crimes rise nationwide.
“The numbers are moving in the wrong direction,” said Marian Braccia, a professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law and a former prosecutor in the district attorney’s family violence and sexual assault unit. “It’s terrifying.”
In Philadelphia last year, the slaying of Kada Scott drew attention to the issue after The Inquirer reported that her accused killer, Keon King, had previously been accused of stalking and kidnapping another woman. But two criminal cases against him fell apart when the victim failed to appear in court and prosecutors withdrew the charges.
And last month, calls for awareness surrounding domestic violence were renewed when Yuan Yuan Lu, 28, was killed one day after reporting that her ex-boyfriend had sexually assaulted her in his Pennsport home. Police say 32-year-old Yujun Ren followed Lu to her Levittown home and shot her in the head, killing her.
According to prosecutors, Lu told police the day before she was killed that Ren carried a gun and she feared for her safety.
Philadelphia’s new unit would work to support victims in just such circumstances, officials said. The office launched last spring with 10 victim advocates with backgrounds in social work and behavioral health.
In March, those staffers will begin working with victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, said Ayanna Greene-Davis, executive director of the Office of Community Advocacy and Engagement.
And the unit will add 10 more members — sworn police officers with law enforcement experience — who will complete similar victim-oriented training, she said.
Ayanna Greene-Davis, 47, Executive Director for Office of Community Advocacy and Engagement, of Northwest Philadelphia, Pa., poses for a portrait at the Philadelphia Police Headquarters in Philadelphia, Pa., on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. .
“We’re not going to take days and days and days” to respond to reports of domestic violence, Greene-Davis said. “In the past, that happened.”
Victims of such crimes will be able to call the office’s advocates to voice concerns about their cases as they are investigated, according to Greene-Davis. And advocates will be trained to connect them with resources such as domestic abuse shelters and provide information on ways to remove themselves from dangerous living situations.
The unit will also oversee a broader effort to train patrol officers throughout the department to better assess the dangers victims of domestic violence face and work to keep them safe.
“Every victim is going to be in a different stage, but we can talk to them,” Greene-Davis said. “We can provide a safety plan.”
Elizabeth Killough remembers the beginning of Media’s Fair Trade history as follows: She was sitting at her desk at UnTours, an unconventional Media-based travel company, next to her boss and UnTours founder Hal Taussig.
Taussig, sitting in his beloved rickety desk chair, began to share a vision with Killough: What if his hometown of Media could become a hub for Fair Trade, a global trading system that prioritizes quality products and fair wages for farmers in the developing world? What if Media’s shops and restaurants could stock products made and sold with equity and respect?
“I couldn’t even begin to imagine what that would be [like],” Killough remembers.
To humor Taussig, she googled “Fair Trade towns” (the internet was remarkably slow in the mid-2000s, so it took a few minutes to populate the results, she said). An email for Bruce Crowther, the father of Fair Trade in Garstang, England, popped up. Killough sent him a note. Despite the fact that it was 10 p.m. in England, Crowther wrote right back. He wanted to help make Taussig’s dream a reality.
In the months that followed, Taussig and Killough would help spearhead an effort to make Media the first Fair Trade town in the United States, a push that took the cooperation of local business owners, civic leaders, and borough council members. As Media marks 20 years of its Fair Trade Town status, Fair Trade products, and Taussig’s formidable footprint, can be found all over the Delaware County community.
State Street, near Olive Street, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025, in Media, Pa. Businesses that sell Fair Trade products dot Media’s main commercial artery, a sign of the enduring legacy of Hal Taussig and Media’s Fair Trade advocates.
What is Fair Trade?
Fair Trade is a global trading arrangement under which farmers are paid higher wages in exchange for assurances that they will use eco-friendly practices, ensure safe working conditions, and invest in their communities. The trading practice seeks to uplift producers in the developing world, where environmental exploitation and forced labor can be common in the agriculture business. Common Fair Trade products include coffee, chocolate, and bananas.
Fair Trade guarantees farmers can charge minimum prices for goods, acting as a safety net against market instability. Some Fair Trade suppliers receive a “premium fund,” or an additional sum of money put aside to invest in education, healthcare, infrastructure, or business improvement products in their communities. In exchange for economic security, Fair Trade producers must provide workers with reasonable work hours, safe working conditions, and maternity leave, and are barred from using child and forced labor.
Killough’s email to Crowther set off a monthslong campaign to make Media the United States’s first Fair Trade Town, a moniker now proudly displayed on “Welcome to Media” signs on the borough’s outskirts.
Taussig had been thinking about sustainability in the global economy for decadesbefore Media’s formal designation. In 1992, Taussig and his wife, Norma, founded UnTours, an unconventional “slow travel company” that helped people connect to faraway lands through community engagement and sustainable tourism practices. Friends described Taussig as unique and empathetic. He was famously averse to making a profit, sharing UnTours’ returns with customers, staff, and, later, the UnTours Foundation, which invests in sustainable business ventures.
Taussig, who died in 2016, was “a really sweet man that cared about the world a lot,” said Ira Josephs, the executive director of the Media Fair Trade Committee.
Taussig and Killough began meeting with a group of stakeholders who shared the goal of bringing Fair Trade to Media. At the time, there was no organization overseeing Fair Trade communities in the U.S., so the Media group decided to “self-declare” under the criteria used by Garstang, the first Fair Trade Town in the world. They needed to persuade a certain number of Media retailers to sell Fair Trade-certified items and ask local schools and businessesto use Fair Trade goods. The guidelines also required Media to establish a Fair Trade committee; have an elected body pass a resolution supporting Fair Trade; and promote media coverage and education around Fair Trade.
A number of stores in Media already carried Fair Trade products, and many of its churches and Quaker meetinghouses used Fair Trade coffee and sugar. The working group made a website and brought on board Monica Simpson, a borough council member who helped convince the governing body to pass a Fair Trade resolution. The borough council saw it as a way for “this local community to make an international connection,” Killough said.
Once all of the criteria were met, “we just self-declared that we were the first Fair Trade town,” Josephs said.
At the time, New York City and Los Angeles were working on their own Fair Trade proposals. Yet Media, a 5,000-resident borough in the heart of Delco, beat them to the punch.
“It was rebellious,” Josephs said.
On July 12, 2006, Media held a public ceremony unveiling its status as a Fair Trade town.
Many of Media’s businesses got on board.
When Tara and Brent Endicott, the owners of downtown Media’s Burlap & Bean, first got into the coffee business, they knew they wanted “to feel like we were making a difference,” Tara Endicott said.
All of the coffee sold at Burlap & Bean is Fair Trade-certified and organic, a decision the Endicotts made in 2006 when they opened their first location in nearby Newtown Square,inspired in part by Media’s Fair Trade push.
Though their coffee-industry friends told them they were crazy for stocking only Fair Trade products, which are more expensive and harder to source, the Fair Trade beans won over the coffee purveyors and their Media-area customers.
Signage that reads, America’s First Free Trade Town, Media, PA., Wednesday, June 4, 2025. This sign is at N. Providence Road where it crosses N. Monroe Street.
Fair Trade in Media, two decades later
Fair Trade lives on in the stores, restaurants, and coffee shops that dot Media’s bustling downtown.
All of the international products at Earth & State, a pottery and craft shop, are from Fair Trade groups. Bittersweet Kitchen, a pizza and brunch spot, serves Fair Trade hot chocolate and coffee. Mom-and-daughter-owned yarn shop Homesewn sells yarn from Fair Trade Federation members and other companies that follow Fair Trade principles. Even Trader Joe’s, located in Media’s old armory building, stocks Fair Trade coffee.
On Valentine’s Day, the Media Fair Trade Committee hosted its annual Fair Trade chocolate tasting. The committee also hosts an annual juggling contest with Fair Trade soccer balls at Dining Under the Stars.
Fair Trade’s future is not entirely certain.
Fair Trade groups have come under scrutiny in recent years for corporatizing a once mission-driven practice. It has been hard at times to get businesses to splurge on Fair Trade goods, first during the 2008 recession and then again during the pandemic, Killough said. As rents rise in Media, there is a “constant turnover of store owners and restaurateurs,” Killough added, making it an ongoing effort to keep Fair Trade practices alive.
“It’s going to continue to require a lot of work, a lot of commitment, and a lot of education,” she said.
Last year was “the worst year financially that we’ve ever had,” Tara Endicott of Burlap & Bean said. Despite having the highest customer counts in Burlap & Bean’s history, high coffee prices and tariffs left the Endicotts taking home meager profits at the end of the day. They have thought about opening up their business to non-Fair Trade coffee but have not yet, relying on the hope that economic conditions will improve.
Ultimately, Brent Endicott said, he and his wife are proud to be in Media and to be serving Fair Trade beans.
“We’re thrilled to be able to do our part to help Media stay a certified Fair Trade town,” he said.
This suburban content is produced with support from the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer’s high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com/donate. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org/supporters.
To be a privy digger in Philadelphia is to be part excavator, part flea market authority, and part pirate. First, you must be able to dig — sometimes 30-plus feet in rocky soil — to get to the bottom of a centuries-old outhouse. Whatever you find buried in the organic waste there, you must research. And much of this digging and discovery takes place in secret in the middle of the night, on open construction sites across the city where you’re not exactly supposed to be.
“Obviously, it’s sketchy. We would have the police come,” said Matt Waholek,39, a longtime Philadelphia privy digger who now lives on Long Island. “They would be like, ‘Alright, you’re not burying bodies, right?’”
Privy diggers are not burying bodies. Instead, Waholek and his fellow diggers are hobbyistsprobing for a certain kind of treasure — ceramic cups and bowls, clay pipes, glass bottles — that long-ago Philadelphians threw into their outhouses before the existence of citywide trash collection.
Most of the diggers are only interested in land that was developed before 1880, when the rise of factory production led to fewer handmade objects. One digger described finding half a dozen handblown glass devices from the mid-19th century that turned out to be early breast pumps.
Privy digging is often done at night, when construction workers are not on-site, and diggers often work in pairs or teams because the digging itself can be dangerous. This photo was taken during a dig in Old City in November 2023.
It’s a largely male, macho subculture, rife with big characters and rumors of those who are not to be trusted because they absconded with their fellow diggers’ treasure.
“One guy was checking his car for pipe bombs ‘cause he thought I was gonna blow his car up,” said George Mathes, owner of the thrift store Thunderbird Salvage in Kensington, who has dug about 1,000 privies over the years. (He said he did not blow up anyone’s car.) He estimated there are about 15 privy diggers excavating today in the city.
As America’s 250th birthday approaches, Philadelphia is in the national spotlight, being counted on to reflect the country’s history back to itself. The question of how to preserve and tell that history has become more pressing than ever.
With its 300-year-old neighborhoods and relatively lax oversight, Philly is alsoa center of clandestine digging. People are legally allowed to keep almost anything they find under the ground on their own properties; privy diggers describe legally digging on someone else’s property as being “on a permission.”
A collection of bottles from the 1850s, dug out by Matt Waholek and other diggers from a privy in Queen Village in 2015. The collection includes pontil soda and beer bottles, as well as stoneware beer bottles. The clay used to make the bottles was sourced in Philadelphia, and most of the glass was probably produced here.
But there’s also a fair amount of trespassing, and some of the privy diggers sell what they find. (Prosecution is rare, though Mathes was arrested and sentenced to 24 hours community service for digging on someone else’s property in Old City in 2010, he said.)
All of this has frustrated professional archaeologists, whose job is not just to remove particularly interesting relics from the earth, but to document exactly where they were found and what relation they had to one another, in an attempt to tell a whole, contextualized story about the past.
They say Philadelphia has done little to protect its buried history. Unlike other historic cities, such as Boston or Alexandria, Va., Philadelphia does not have a city archaeologist, who would be responsible for guiding the city’s historical commission and offering insight to residents.
Into that breach, some see the amateurs — “whether you want to call them looters or private collectors,” as Doug Mooney, president of the nonprofit Philadelphia Archaeological Forum, put it — as taking and selling collective artifacts while recklessly destroying historical sites in the process.
Much of what professional archaeologists are interested in is not glamorous, said Jed Levin, an archaeologist for more than 50 years and the vice president of the forum. They are just as compelled by the preserved remains of human intestinal parasites and hundreds-year-old pollen grains as they are by whole glass bottles. Such microscopic information can reveal what Philadelphians were eating and growing hundreds of years ago.
Yet that kind of detail is lost to amateur diggers, who are far more interested in removing intact artifacts, some of which might net them hundreds or thousands of dollars.
“They dig indiscriminately through soil layers,” said Levin. “Once you dig through a site, you’ve destroyed it. It’s gone.”
Matt Dunphy digs a privy pit near his home in Old City in May 2021. The dark column of soil in the right corner is indicative of the nitrogen-rich soil (also called “night soil”) found in a privy pit. This particular pit was 7 feet wide and 20 feet deep, likely dating to the 1740s.
The code of the privy pirates
Privy digging as a hobby surged in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, when the construction of Interstate 95 uprooted miles of soil across the city.
Over the decades, it became a passionate pursuit and then an underground industry. It’s driven largely by obsession: Diggers might find treasure, but they also might find nothing at all. Some end up with hundreds or thousands of broken pottery pieces. When I asked Waholek what he did with all the things he found over two decades, he replied, “Do you want some of it?”
Both the city’s amateur diggers and the professional archaeologists contend that they’re the ones working in the public interest, aiming to make their findings available to the most people.
“I don’t like the word ‘amateur.’ I probably know a lot more than some archaeologists. They focus mainly on one topic,” said Waholek, who calls himself an “avocational archaeologist.”
Some privy diggers say they are particularly moved to preserve objects that otherwise might be forgotten. Mathes, of Thunderbird Salvage, said he had found spearheads and Native American artifacts in his digs, objects which he does not sell. (Repatriation laws don’t apply to private property owners).
A brick-lined privy in North Philadelphia, pictured here in 2015. The ladder is an antique fire escape salvaged from a demolition on Frankford Avenue.
“To me, they’re more spiritual. I display those with the greatest of respect. I show them off to people, I like to hold them,” he said. “To donate them to a museum, most of the time they’re going to get put in a drawer and not displayed because there’s limited space.”
Over the years, some diggers have formed relationships with construction workers and police. One local developer described learning about the hobby when he encountered a group of men trespassing on his construction site carrying what he believed to be spears. (They were actually handmade metal probes, which the diggers use alongside shovels, clam rakes, pickaxes, and tripods and pulleys.) The developer was disturbed until he, too, became fascinated.
As with any subculture, there are rules about how to dig with integrity, said Michael Frechette, 60, an artist and veteran privy digger who lives in Kensington. Among them: Always ask permission; never dig on federal land where archaeologists are already working; fill in the hole you make; respect other diggers’ claims; and maintain honor within your own group — equal work should lead to equal bounty.
But, of course, as Mathes put it: “There’s pirates that work with you and there’s pirates that’ll work against you.”
Melissa Dunphy, pictured here in 2022, stands in the ground level of her Old City property. It was here that Dunphy and her husband, Matt, discovered two privies filled with 18th century artifacts.
Who gets to call themselves an archaeologist
The non-sketchy, wholesome representatives of the privy digging community in Philadelphia are Melissa and Matt Dunphy, who call themselves “citizen archaeologists.” She’s a composer with a doctorate in music; he’s an e-commerce engineer.
They fell down the rabbit hole of privy digging about a decade ago after they bought a shuttered magic theater in Old City with a deed dating back to 1745 and began to renovate.
The construction workers uncovered two privies on their property, one of which the Dunphys excavated right away. Since then, they’ve dug six more privies in the vicinity and launched a podcast, The Boghouse, about their discoveries.
Every inch of the Dunphys’ walls are taken up by artifacts they’ve dug up in privies near their home in Old City.
The two have become “obsessed at the level that now we give talks at Colonial Williamsburg,” Matt Dunphy said.
Their apartment, on the third floor of the former magic theater, is packed floor to ceiling with thousands upon thousands of shards of pottery and other artifacts. The bathroom has relics displayed on every wall, and the glass cabinets in the kitchen are filled not with matching plates but with broken teapots, chamber pots, punch bowls, and cups, each with their own carefully researched backstory.
The Dunphys are amateurs whohave not formally studied archaeology, but they are brimming with intellectual curiosity and knowledge about what they’ve found.
They mostlydon’t sell their discoveries (Melissa Dunphy has sold some found teeth) and are instead working to build a museum on the ground floor of the theater, which they hope to open by July. They want to call it “The Necessary Museum,” because privies were often called necessaries.
“These objects — even something as simple as a bowl — tell you something about the people who used them, the people who made them, the journey that that object took,” Melissa Dunphy said. “This is like a passing of stewardship of this little postage stamp-sized corner of the world.”
Melissa Dunphy, pictured here in 2022, holds a delft punch bowl which she pieced together from pieces found in the privies below her house. The bowl commemorates Britain’s victory over the Scottish Jacobite Army at The Battle of Culloden in 1746.
“What an anti-Jacobite bowl is doing in my privy is such an exciting question to me,” Dunphy said.
Melissa Dunphy, pictured here in 2022, holds a bowl at the Dunphy’s home.
Unlike those who work in secret, the Dunphys are in close touch with archaeologists at the National Park Service and local museums, speak at archaeology conferences, and regularly text with the editor of the academic journal Ceramics in America, whom they consider a mentor.
When they first found glass bottles in the privy in their backyard back in 2016, they tried reaching out to various archaeologists and museums in the city asking how they should proceed, they said. But no one was particularly helpful, and they only had a week before the hole would be filled in.
So they set about trying to “rescue” as much as they could themselves.
Matt and Melissa Dunphy pose in their first privy dig, in this photo from July 2016. While foundation work was being done on the shuttered magic theater they had just bought, workers unearthed two colonial-era privy pits. The Dunphys excavated them, fueling a decade-long obsession.
“My assumption then was that this archaeology is probably everywhere in Philly, and it’s probably not that important. So I don’t have to feel academically guilty about doing it myself, without any real expertise,” Melissa Dunphy said. She descended the privy hole in a cobbled-together archaeological outfit: Duluth Trading Co. coveralls, a “Rosie the Riveter” scarf, a camping headlamp.
The couple fashioned screens from chicken wire they bought at Home Depot to sift pottery from dirt, and Matt Dunphy photoshopped a picture of a ruler he saw at the Museum of the American Revolution to measure the objects they uncovered.
Scott Stephenson, president of that museum, who in the years since has gotten to know the Dunphys well, said he supports people doing “citizen archaeology” alongside professionals.
Museum of the American Revolution head Scott Stephenson, pictured here at Philly’s Revolutionary-era tavern, A Man Full of Trouble, likens each archeological site to a diary that can only be read once.
But he likens each archaeological site to a diary that you can only read once, because the story is as much about the objects that are buried as it is about the relationship between them. When amateurs “read the diary,” it’s like they’re “only recording three words off of an entire page,” he said.
Before the Museum of the American Revolution opened, it conducted a massive archaeological dig on its site that included multiple privies. The recovered artifacts are part of a display at the museum called “Trash Tells the Truth.”
Before opening, the Museum of the American Revolution conducted its own privy dig with professional archeologists.
The Dunphys acknowledge that they don’t document the stratigraphy, or the exact chronological layering, of the privies they have dug. But they also see themselves as democratizing an important effort, saving bits of the past that would otherwise be wholly lost. It’s not as if the city’s professional archaeologists have the time or ability to carefully dig every backyard under construction across Philadelphia.
“We have watched with our own eyes archaeological features being crushed up and destroyed during construction in our neighborhood,” Melissa Dunphy said.
Some archaeologists are frustrated by the very notion of “citizen archaeology.”
“Would we talk about an ‘amateur doctor?’ No. Medicine takes training and following a set of techniques and ethics. Archaeology, the same thing,” said Levin of the Archaeological Forum. Of privy diggers, he said, “They are not amateur archaeologists. They are no stripe of archaeologist.”
Pieces of artifacts at the Dunphys’ home, pictured here in 2022.
Piecing the past back together
On a recent afternoon, Matt Dunphy donned black rubber gloves, filled an Ikea strainer with sudsy water in the sink, and began to scrub pottery shards with a small denture brush. Centuries-old dirt trickled down the drain.
Next to him, pieces of clean pottery lay on a towel to dry. Many privy diggers don’t take the time to piece together the hundreds of broken pieces they find, because it can seem like a nearly impossible task. But Melissa Dunphy sees it as puzzle-making “boss level.” To repair a single ceramic bowl might take a week of 16-hour days, she said.
She uses painters tape to keep related pieces together, and when they seem to fit, she uses archival-grade museum glue diluted with a syringe full of acetone to seal them back together.
The thrill of bringing something back to life — it’s like nothing else.
“This is the first time that someone has seen this bowl,” she said, “the way that it’s supposed to be, in hundreds of years.”
“Why would you not want to study the thing that lets you study,” said Schechtman-Taylor, a senior from New York City. “The brain, that’s our entire world.”
Neuroscience has become the most popular major on the highly selective liberal arts campus on Philadelphia’s Main Line, counting nearby Bryn Mawr College students who also take classes at Haverford. And it’s only been around since 2021 when the two colleges — which have had a minor in the discipline since 2013 — decided to administer the joint major.
At Haverford, there were 24 majors the year it started; now there are 60. Bryn Mawr saw similar growth and currently has 49. Enrollment in Haverford’s neuroscience classes including both Bryn Mawr and Haverford students grew from 154 in 2014 to nearly 800 last fall.
“We knew that neuroscience was going to be popular, but we did not anticipate this growth,” said Helen White, Haverford’s provost, who noted the school recently hired another neuroscience professor to accommodate more students.
The major’s popularity is also growing at schools around the Philadelphia region — and across the country. Students and professors say neuroscience is popular because it’s interdisciplinary, involving psychology, biology, and chemistry, and can lead to a variety of careers. It can also be personal, because it involves studying diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, which have no cures, and the treatment of strokes and traumatic brain injuries.
“I would say about 90% of my students are coming into my lab because they have someone in their family with one of these diseases,” said Rob Fairman, a Haverford biology professor whose research focuses on neuroscience.
Haverford senior Alina Schechtman-Taylor, 21, of New York City, works as a teacher assistant in professor Laura Been’s lab.
A growing major
In 2008, 110 colleges nationally offered neuroscience majors; now, it’s about 330, said Raddy Ramos, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the New York Institute of Technology. Ramos, who coauthored studies on the topic, said there were more than 2,000 neuroscience graduates in 2008; in 2019, that number had grown to more than 7,200.
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Pennsylvania is a hot spot, with 36 colleges having programs in 2022-23, Ramos said — more than than any other state.
Drexel University, which has had a minor since 2015, launched its undergraduate major in neuroscience in 2024.
“We have seen a 45% increase in applications over the last two years,” a university spokesperson said.
Pennsylvania State University in November announced it was launching two new undergraduate majors in neuroscience, one offered by the biology department and the other by the biobehavioral health department.
Students look for sections of rat brains that match the sections projected on the screen in a Haverford College lab.
Neuroscience has become especially popular among pre-med majors, school officials say. Otherpotential career paths include biotechnology, pharmacology, psychology, and neuroengineering, while somestudents go on to law school, business, or public policy.
“There’s a lot more awareness that mental health conditions are due to changes in the brain, and people want to understand that,” said Lisa Briand, associate professor and program director for Temple University’s neuroscience program.
At Temple, neuroscience has become the fourth largest of 30 majors in liberal arts, Briand said. The psychology department a few years ago changed its name to psychology and neuroscience, she said.
At the University of Pennsylvania a decade ago, 100 to 120 neuroscience majors graduated annually, said Lori Flanagan-Cato, associate professor of psychology and codirector of the undergraduate neuroscience program.
“Twice in the past 3 years we have had over 150,” she said.
Swarthmore College, a highly selective small liberal arts college, graduated 10 to 12 neuroscience majors a year about a decade ago, said Frank Durgin, professor of psychology who oversees the program.
“This year, we anticipate graduating 24 majors,” he said. “Next year, it’s 30.”
The college has added two professors in the last two years to accommodate growth, he said.
Why students study neuroscience
In a lab at Haverford one afternoon last month, 16 students in white lab coats poked with paintbrush tips at thin slices of rat brain in preservative fluid, preparing to stain them to look for which neurons were activated. Some of the rats received the drug Ritalin, commonly used for attention deficit disorder, while others did not. Students were trying to discern differences in their brains when they performed certain tasks, said Laura Been, associate professor of psychology and director of the bi-college neuroscience program.
A neuroscience student works with sections of rats’ brains in a lab at Haverford College.
“We can … try to learn something more about how this sort of drug treatment impacts the brain,” said Been, whose area of interest is behavioral neuroendocrinology, which looks at the relationship between hormones, the brain, and behavior.
Students in Been’s class had varied reasons for studying neuroscience.
Emily Black, visiting assistant professor of neuroscience at Haverford College, helps Savannah Shaw, 22, of Downingtown, during neuroscience lab work. “I really like the variety of the classes we can take in the major,” said Shaw, a senior who plans to go to medical school, possibly to become a neurologist. “You can go more the psychology route or go more biology.”
Sophia Lipari, 21, a junior from Jacksonville, Fla., whose father is a reproductive endocrinologist, is interested in hormones and the field of fertility.
Riley Fass, 20, a junior from Claremont, Calif., wants to be a special-education teacher. She already sees the connection between neuroscience and her job as a teacher’s assistant at a school where children have traumatic brain injuries and cerebral palsy.
“The topics we discuss — an injury here will result in this — I can actually see it in my students,” she said.
Iris Goxhaj (left), 21, of Northeast Philadelphia, and Riley Fass, 20, of Claremont, Calif., work with sections of rats’ brains in a lab at Haverford College.
Deeya Abrol’s interest was stoked when she worked with a child on the autism spectrum as a swim instructor. Abrol, 22, a senior from Los Gatos, Calif., plans to go to medical school.
Schechtman-Taylor meanwhile wants to pursue biomedical engineering and specifically developing medicines for the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders.
“I want to work on the treatment side,” she said.
Fairman, the Haverford biology professor, said a recent graduate’s mother had died of Huntington’s disease, meaning she has a 50% chance of getting it, he said. She worked in his lab and wanted to be involved in hisresearchon protein clumping in the brain and its effect on diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Rob Fairman, a professor of biology at Haverford College, and student Liv Davis are testing the effects of natural products on animal models with neurodegenerative diseases.
Junior Liv Davis, 21, wanted to help find a cure for Parkinson’s, which struck her grandmother in 2020.
“She’s had two falls in the last year and a half because it’s progressed pretty quickly,” said Davis, of Lanoka Harbor, N.J. “It’s hard to see someone you love so much live with it, but it makes it all the more rewarding to work toward fixing it.”
Davis, who has worked in Fairman’s lab since her freshman year, tried to get into an introduction to neuroscience class early on. But there wasn’t room. She ended up majoring in biology, which she thinks probably would have happened anyway.
About half the students working in Fairman’s lab are neuroscience majors, he said.
Davis is currently studying the effect of a chemical on sleeping fruit flies that have been genetically modified to carry the protein associated with Parkinson’s.
Last summer, she received an inaugural research fellowship funded by Shamir Khan, a Haverford alumnus and psychologist who was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s.
Her grandmother was glad she could continue the research, said Davis, who plans to become a doctor.
“She always jokes with me,” Davis said. “‘Give me a spoonful of that chemical, whatever it is. If you need a test subject, you let me know.’”
At AMS Surgery Center in suburban Montgomery County, patients can park right in front of the entrance, walk through just a few doors, and undergo cardiac procedures in a sterile operating room with equipment as high-tech as in any hospital procedure room.
In the year and a half since its first patient underwent a cardiac catheterization, the center has performed more than 1,000 cardiac procedures that previously required patients to go to full-service hospitals.
The Horsham center showcases a new front as sophisticated healthcare procedures move to freestanding outpatient medical facilities, promising to save patients money. The shift also adds to the financial pressures facing the region’s hospital-centered health systems.
Four centers have opened or are in the final stages of approvals in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Their arrival comes after state lawmakers in 2022 broadly expandedthe types of procedures allowed outside hospitals to include cardiac catheterizations, pacemaker implants, and other treatments that until then had to be done in a hospital.
Pennsylvania is the first Northeastern state to allow the minimally invasive procedures in freestanding surgery centers, but Southern states like Florida, Louisiana, and Texas have permitted the practice for decades, experts said. Research has found surgery centers generally are as safe as outpatient departments in hospitals.
An independent physicians group, Bryn Mawr Medical Specialists Association, opened Heart & Vascular Center of the Main Line — the Philadelphia region’s first such center — in late 2022. in Bryn Mawr. AMS Surgery Center in Horsham performed its first procedure in the fall of 2024, initially treating only Medicare patients. Itadded patients with private insurance last summer.
The market has continued torapidly expand:ReVaMP Heart & Vascular Surgery Center in Center City started treating Medicare patients last fall. The Ambulatory Cardiovascular Center of Pennsylvania, near King of Prussia, expects to perform its first procedures on patients next month.
Medicare pays the centers about a third less than hospital outpatient departments for the same procedures, but the centers have significantly lower costs, allowing them to be profitable. Medicare pays physicians the same wherever procedures are done.
Independent cardiology groups traditionally have performed interventional procedures, such as implanting stents and pacemakers, in hospitals. Some are jumping at the opportunity to expand through the surgery centers, where they can have a financial stake in the entire operation.
“We’ve always been very fiercely independent, fiercely entrepreneurial, and patient-centered,” said Richard Borge, an AMS interventional cardiologist who is medical director for the group’s surgery center.
How much cardiac care — among the most profitable business lines for hospitals — will move out of hospital outpatient departments remains unknown. But cardiac surgical clinics will not take over heart care to the extent seen when outpatient orthopedic centers began offering hip and joint replacements,predicted Lauren Clementi, a senior vice president at Kaufman Hall, a Chicago consulting firm.
“This one’s a little trickier because the acuity of patients,” she said.
Cardiologists will continue treating many patients with complex medical needs in hospitals, which remain the only option for riskier procedures such as open-heart surgeries.
Gregory Schmitt went to AMS Surgery Center to undergo procedures for a heart stent and stents in both legs.The retired machine-shop owner, who lives in Ivyland, called such centers great for patients.
“I highly recommend it. It’s much easier than trying to navigate a hospital,” Schmitt said.
How we got here
Healthcare has been shifting awayfrom requiring overnight hospital stays, even for common procedures like cataract surgery.The trend starteddecades ago with same-day procedures in hospitals, followed by the rise of freestanding surgery centers.
In cardiology, people now commonly receivestents and pacemakers as outpatient care. But until recently, doctors had to implant the devices in a hospital.
“Once upon a time, every patient we cathed had to spend the night in the hospital,” said veteran cardiologist Mark Victor, referring to cardiac catheterization.
With the rise of outpatient procedures,Victor said, the question for many clinicians became: “If they’re hospital ambulatory, why do they have to be in the hospital at all?”
Victor has long advocated for the adoption of outpatient cardiology proceduresas the CEO of Cardiology Consultants of Philadelphia. Thelarge cardiology practice joined last year a national private-equity backed group, Cardiovascular Logistics, and will soon start performing surgical procedures at the center opening near King of Prussia.
In 2020, Medicare started paying for outpatient cardiac catheterizations — which entail running a catheter through a blood vessel in the thigh or wrist to examine the heart and install devices like stents.
Richard Borge is medical director of AMS Cardiology Surgery Center in Horsham, whose arrival is moving advanced cardiac care from hospitals to outpatient clinics.
Even then, Pennsylvania rules required cardiac catheterizations to occur in an acute-care hospital, according to Stephen Abresch, director of government affairs for the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association, a national trade group in Alexandria, Va.
Pennsylvania lawmakers cleared the way for expansion byeliminating that restriction in 2022 as part of a broad expansion of what the state’s surgery centers were allowed to do. “It had been a quarter century since the state had gone in and reviewed that,” he said.
The Heart & Vascular Center of the Main Line has scheduled its first cardiac ablations this week. Horsham’s AMSaims to start offering those procedures in June. Victor’s King of Prussia groupexpects to add ablations in the future as well.
Impact on hospitals
It is too soon to know how the new surgery centers will impact the region’s existing health systems. In some cases, independent cardiologists generate significant patient numbers forhospitals’ cath labs.
After Bryn Mawr Medical Specialists opened its cardiovascular surgery center near Main Line Health’s Bryn Mawr Hospital, the private group performed fewer procedures on low-risk patients at the hospital.
To sustain patient volumes, Main Line has increased collaboration with other physician practices, while continuing to treat an“older patient population, whose more complex health conditions require the advanced expertise and emergency support only a hospital setting can provide,” officials said in a statement.
In Horsham, most of the patients coming to AMS would have gone toJefferson Abington Hospital before the surgery center opened in partnership with Atria Health, a private-equity backed group, Borge said.
Jefferson declined to comment.
King of Prussia’s Ambulatory Cardiovascular Center of Pennsylvania is opening through anunusual four-way partnership involving Cardiology Consultants of Philadelphia, Cardiovascular Logistics, SCA (a unit of UnitedHealth’s Optum), and the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
“Ours is not going to seriously impact any one hospital system, which they’re all relieved about,” said Victor, who is also president of the Mid-Atlantic region for Cardiovascular Logistics. He said other health systems were invited to invest in the surgery center, but only Penn did so.
Penn declined to comment for this article. On the Alvarez & Marsal What’s Your Moonshot podcast, the health system’s chief operating officer, Michele Volpe, recently said the system needs ”to move a bit faster in taking much of the work that we are doing in inpatient ORs and moving them into outpatient or ambulatory freestanding ORs.”
AMS Cardiology’s ambulatory surgery center in Horsham is one of four new cardiovascular surgery centers in Southeastern Pennsylvania.
Center City’s ReVaMP Health & Vascular Surgery Center wantsto bring in cardiologists from nonaffiliated practices,and even the city’s big health systems. The facility opened last year, spearheaded by Re-Vasc Med Professionals’ two interventional cardiologists in partnership with Surgery Partners, a publicly traded manager of surgery centers nationwide.
“I’m 100% sure this is going to be the trend of the future,” Re-Vasc CEO and founder Jon George said.
A health insurer’s perspective
Richard Snyder, a top executive at Independence Blue Cross, the largest health insurer in Southeastern Pennsylvania, has for years watched joint replacements and other procedures shift from hospitals to lower-cost surgery centers.
The financial impact goes beyond the lower prices at surgery centers, he said, expecting that hospitals will not simply cede these patients to new competitors.
Some hospitals might decide to take a lower payment for outpatient procedures. “Traditionally, that happens when we have capacity in lower-cost settings,” he said.
At the same time, Medicare is pushing to pay the same price for services, wherever they are performed. “Hospitals, by necessity, will need to move some things to lower-cost settings in order to not lose money on them,” Snyder said.
The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Philadelphia Flower Show is back at the Convention Center, full of colors, scented exhibits, flowery crowns, and roots.
Through March 8, visitors can celebrate the 197th edition of the region’s premier botanical show. This year’s installment commemorates the nation’s 250th anniversary under the theme “Rooted: Origins of American Gardening.”
The displays honor the people, places, and traditions that shaped gardening in the United States. So, we asked attendees on Saturday, the show’s opening day:
“What roots you into gardening?”
Learning to let go
Judy Baskin, 70, and her husband, Richard Tassano, 77, have been gardening together for over 30 years.
Between raised beds, produce, and a mutual hatred of mowing, the Bala Cynwyd couple found in gardening a way to maintain and strengthen their connection with each other and their community.
“It’s really nice to do it together,” Baskin said. “But if you were to listen to us, there is a lot of ‘I don’t want that there,’ or ‘Move that there.’”
Richard Tassano, 77, and Judy Baskin, 70, of Bala Cynwyd, Pa., pose for a portrait at the Flower Show in Philadelphia, Pa., on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. The two have been gardening together growing mainly vegetables and few flowers to help pollination for their plants. “Every year we learn something new,” Richard said.
Those green debates have prompted better communication, and an easier time choosing their battles.
“You learn something new every year,” Tassano said. “You have to learn to let go and go figure out what you are going to sacrifice to the squirrels and raccoons.”
But the couple don’t just garden for themselves. Their tomatoes, lettuce, pesto, garlic, brussels sprouts, and peppers (hot and sweet) have also prompted better relationships with their neighbors.
“We have Cambodian neighbors we can’t talk to,” Baskin said, referencing a language barrier. “But we exchange vegetables that go from our gardens to our tables.”
Memories from a distant past
For Mayumi Welman, 61, gardening brings back memories of loved ones and places she can now access only in her mind.
She drove three hours from Virginia to experience the Flower Show for the first time with her son, New Jersey resident Millan Welman.
As she and her son walked around, tiny flowers reminded Mayumi of her mother and her love for dianthus.
Mayumi Welman, 61, of Fairfax, Va., poses for a portrait with her son Millan Welman, 25, of Princeton, N.J., at the Flower Show in Philadelphia, Pa., on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. Mayumi has been gardening for about 40 plus years. Her favorite flowers are Tulips and Roses.
The poppies brought back memories of her kindergarten teacher, back in her native Japan, whose kindness with plants inspired a green thumb for a then-6-year-old Welman.
“Different plants bring back different memories of different people,” Welman said. “Tulips and roses are my favorites, but it’s too hard to pick because they are like choosing my favorite child.”
Despite not being a gardener himself, Welman’s only child, Millan, has learned a lot about life through seeing his mom care for plants.
“She gave me an appreciation and respect for the natural world,” Millan Welman said. “I look at her and I feel respect for that level of commitment and a certain nostalgia because it’s a sight I grew up with.”
More oxygen, less seasonal depression
Megan Robbins and her husband, Hunter, have over 50 plants at home, including a three-foot-high baby monstera.
The Bellmawr couple got into gardening in 2024, looking to improve air quality in their home, and found an unexpected love that brought them closer.
“It’s an intentional time spent together; you have to be locked in and there is always something you can do,” Hunter Robbins, 34, said. “It’s like having a kid.”
For Megan Robbins, also 34, gardening has helped with her seasonal depression just by touching her plants when she is feeling down.
“It’s really calming,” she said. “There is a sense of accomplishment that you are growing something that you created, an ecosystem. It feels like we are giving back.”
The greenery has also turned their living room and other corners of their home into a concert venue.
Megan Robbins plays classical music for the plants and her husband tunes them in to hip-hop to help them grow.
“The world is crazy enough, so it’s nice to have this space to set up long term and look forward to seeing grow in the future,” Hunter Robbins said.
Robin Posner, 37, of West Philadelphia, Pa., (left), and Megan Robbins, 34, of Bellmawr, N.J., (right), pose for a photo together at the Flower Show in Philadelphia, Pa., on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026.
Named for a sunflower
Lorann Powell inherited her love for gardening from her parents, who gave her Sunflower as a middle name.
“I followed my mom around as she was a landscaper,” Powell said. “She grew everything, so I grew up learning to cultivate and feeding the neighborhood with our vegetables.”
Lorann Sunflower Powell, 65, of Graduate Hospital, poses for a portrait at the Flower Show in Philadelphia, Pa., on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. Lorann has been gardening all her life, beginning with learning from her mother, who was a landscaper.
The Graduate Hospital area still carries that love language. Powell, 65, spends the summers planting seasonal flowers for her neighbors to “make the block beautiful,” she said.
Sunflowers are her favorite things to plant, and she has already passed on the tradition of cultivating them to her children.
“It’s rooted in my system; it is my history and story,” Powell said. “I’m rooted to plant things and let it grow.”
Gardening in the heart of the city
Dana Napier, of Grays Ferry, Pa., 79, poses for a portrait at the Flower Show in Philadelphia, Pa., on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. Dana has been gardening all her life and has been going to the show for over 40 years now.
For Dana Napier, 79, gardening means life — and resilience, particularly when practiced within the city limits.
“It’s important to have a garden when you live in the city,” Napier said. “It gets you off the grid and a lot of wonderful Philadelphia birds come through.”
To her, gardening has become a way of connection, not only with her Grays Ferry neighbors but also with the animal life of Philly. Groundhogs and raccoons have become regular visitors in her backyard.
“It makes me feel like I’m still self-sufficient,” she said. “It gives me peace and my thoughts can go someplace else.”
Root systems are literal and figurative in our language — there are those you can see and touch and eat, and those invisible to the eye that connect us to the people and places that have brought us to this moment.
Both type of roots are important to our past and future and both are explored at the Philadelphia Flower Show this year by gardeners and artists whose exhibits bring to life the show’s theme, “Rooted: Origins of American Gardening.”
As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, the Flower Show celebrates its 197th year by looking back at the history of gardening in the United States. This is the “final chapter in a three-year trilogy” of themes that began in 2024 with “United by Flowers,” which explored current gardening connections, and continued last year with “Gardens of Tomorrow.”
The most notable difference at this year’s Flower Show, which runs through March 8 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, is that the marketplace has been moved out of the main exhibition halls on the upper floor to a separate space below. It’s a welcome change that provides more space for exhibits and visitors and makes the overall experience feel less crowded and commercial.
I went rooting around the Flower Show during a media and members event on Friday. As always, the entrance garden — this year’s is “The Forest Floor” — is a can’t-miss, mainly because you have to walk through it to get in. But after that, here are five other interesting things I suggest making sure to see if you visit this year’s Flower Show.
All the world’s a stage
“Rooted in Love” is a theatrical floral exhibit by Jennifer Designs of Mullica Hill that brings together horticulture and Shakespeare.
That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet, but what if a rose was chosen by central casting to play Juliet? How sweet would that be?
Jennifer Designs of Mullica Hill shows us in its exhibit, “Rooted in Love,” in which an anthropomorphized rose and sunflower play the star-crossed lovers in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on a stage overflowing with flowers.
While the connection to this year’s theme is a bit tenuous — the exhibit “explores the language of horticulture and Shakespeare” — I’m giving it a pass, mostly because I love Shakespeare but also because this display is absolutely stunning.
A Flower Show guest looks at William Shakespeare in the “Rooted in Love” exhibit by Jennifer Designs of Mullica Hill.
Beyond the main scene, there’s a life-size recreation of the Bard made of flowers, a “Bloombill” complete with a cast and crew list, and flower box seats on either side of the stage.
The shop around the corner
Robertson’s Flowers & Events of Wyndmoor digs into its own roots — dating back 99 years — with a charming life-size recreation of its Chestnut Hill corner store.
Each of the four window displays of the 360-degree exhibit celebrate a different era of floristry, from the formal and feather-accented styles of the early 20th century to the neon-lit early ’90s.
Visitors look at Robertson’s Flowers & Events’ “Windows into the Past,” at the Philadelphia Flower Show.
Just as impressive as the structure and display itself is the lush rooftop garden atop the entire building, which teems with orchids and greenery and metaphorically “extends its roots downward,” connecting the shop with the community.
It’s so tiny!
It is here I must make a confession: My favorite part of the Flower Show every year, without fail, is the “Miniature Settings” category, which I call “the dioramas.” This is because I love tiny things and because my dream when I retire is to search for seashells and make dioramas.
I’ve hesitated putting it on my must-see list in previous years because I am 110% biased and because the line to see these mini scenes is always long (I waited about 15 minutes on Friday). But this year’s — which challenged participants to create a setting for an event that happened between the prehistoric era and 1900 — truly is a must-see for Philly lovers.
A visitor to the Flower Show looks at the “Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition: Opening Day, 1875,” one of the exhibits in Miniature Settings category.
While some folks made scenes of the last night in Pompeii or the Roswell UFO crash site, it’s the three Philly-themed dioramas that stood out to me. There’s Benjamin Franklin’s garden, with a floating kite and key and inventive lighting effects; the interior of Independence Hall; and Horticulture Hall at Philadelphia’s Centennial exhibition.
Understood the assignment
With it’s late fall setting and its stark use of flowers and color, the exhibit from W.B. Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences in Roxborough isn’t as eye-catching as many others, initially, but if you take the time to study it and read the placards, it’s by far the most moving, emotionally.
“Up-Rooted, Re-Planted,” explores the roots of our region through the Lenape people, the original Indigenous inhabitants who lived here before being uprooted by European settlers.
A babbling brook runs through a wooded autumn setting that seems just on the brink of winter. A placard in a dugout canoe tells the story of how the Lenape were forced to move westward. And a sturdy wigwam built by hand keeps the food and firewood within it dry.
Andrew Luedders and Lukas Luedders look at W.B Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences’ exhibit “Up-Rooted, Re-Planted.”
Out of all of the exhibits, this was the most on-point when it came to theme and the most profound when I spent some time with it. It’s also a really good learning moment for kids, which is particularly wonderful because it was built by students. I saw several adults kneeling down to read the placards to children and share the story of the people who first planted roots in what is now Philadelphia.
The fun is in details
Some of my favorite moments at the Flower Show this year were small ones I didn’t expect. Throughout the event hall, there are trash cans filled not with garbage, but with daffodils, tulips, and lilacs. It’s a small but sweet touch that adds a bit of whimsy.
In the “Garden Design” section, there’s an exhibit which repurposes stone blocks as books with punny titles written on them like Where the Wild Plants Are, War and Peas, and A Kale of Two Cities.
Tulips in a trash can at the Philadelphia Flower Show.
At the American Landscape Showcase exhibit, there’s a display called “American Anemoia” featuring an overgrown ornamental garden at a vacant house. Nailed to the fading white picket fence of the house is a citation from the city of Philadelphia for weeds and mowing.
If that isn’t rooted in truth, I don’t know what is.
The Philadelphia Flower Show continues through March 8 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, 11th and Arch Streets. Hours: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., except until 6 p.m. on March 8. Ticket prices vary depending on person’s age and day and time of entrance. Information: phsonline.org or 215-988-8800.
Robert Morris School in North Philadelphia has been lauded for improving test scores, and it isthe last elementary school in its immediate neighborhood.
But the school district says not enough neighborhood children want to attend.
At a community meeting last week, district officials said the school’s“severely underutilized” capacity was the driving factor behind their recommendation to close Morris after the next school year.
But community members have questioned why low enrollment alone was enough reason to cut the school — and have voiced concern that the district is closing a school with a majority-Black student population while keeping open a nearby elementary school that has more white students.
“We want the option for our children to be able to walk a block or two or three and get to their school. And it’s not clear to us the reason why that isn’t a possibility,” said Cierra Freeman, co-lead of culture and strategy for the Brewerytown-Sharswood Neighborhood Coalition.
Morris students would be reassigned to Bache-Martin School or William D. Kelley School for fall 2027 under the plan.
The district plans to repurpose the building at 2600 W. Thompson St., which it has categorized as being in “fair” condition, into a hub for its Office of Diverse Learners. Currently, the office operates within district headquarters and has an evaluation center near Central High School.
District officialsalso said theywant to keep the building so it could be reopened as a school in the future should enrollment interest rise.
Robert Morris Elementary School in Brewerytown.
‘Punished for being so small’
Morris was honored by the district last year at its Accelerate Philly awards for major improvements in test scores across reading and math. Its third-grade class jumped from 7% proficiency in reading and 14% in math to 48% and 59%, respectively. The district has said it did not consider schools’ academic performance in its facilities plan.
“It seems like Robert Morris is being punished for being so small,” Paul Brown, a school psychologist at Roxborough High School a Youth and Education co-lead for the Brewerytown Sharswood Neighborhood Coalition and a member of Stand Up for Philly Schools, said at the community meeting.
Neighbors said the district has not done nearly enough to retain and attract families to Morris, a “neighborhood gem,” according to Siobahn Neitzel, a local resident and youth and education action team co-lead for Brewerytown-Sharswood Neighborhood Coalition.
“The challenges that the district talks about with regards to Morris … really come from a continued lack of investment on the district’s part,” she said.
If there must be change at Robert Morris, some speakers urged the district to consider colocating the Office of Diverse Learners with the school instead of closing it. District officials said that option would be considered —but it was not reflected in a revised plan Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. presented Thursday that spared two schools originally slated for closure. Morris is still on the closure list, but the school board could make changes before votingon the plan in the coming weeks.
A changing area
Brewerytown and adjacent Sharswood are neighborhoods in flux. The area is experiencing rapid gentrification, with new developments and property values shooting up in recent years, including the $750 million Philadelphia Housing Authority project to clear and redevelop the Norman Blumberg Apartments towers.
In the last round of mass closures in 2013, the district shuttered Meade Elementary School, less than a mile from Morris. Residents within the Morris catchment area have opted for other choices in recent years, including charters and other public schools. District officials said about 16% of students in Morris’ catchment already attend Bache-Martin.
Third grade teacher Brendan Yuhas teaches students Trenton Andersen, left, and Serenity Rose Rhoades, right, at Robert Morris Elementary last year.
Freeman said that is, in part, the district’s fault.
“This school has not been marketed to parents and families in the neighborhood. It has not been made attractive. It has not been pushed up,” Freeman said.
Some residents are frustrated with the plan to instead investmore than $50 million in Bache-Martin to handle an infusion of hundreds more students, including from Laura W. Waring School, and $4.7 million into Kelley. They believe Bache-Martin students deserve that kind of investment, but so do Kelley and Morris students. District officials said Kelley has received more funding in recent years, making a similarly large investment unnecessary.
Residents are concerned the consolidation could result in violence, by putting kids from different neighborhoods and rival gangs suddenly under the same roof at Bache-Martin or Kelley. And some at the community meeting worried that even if the district reopens the Morris building as a new school, it would be as a magnet that excludes local students.
Undergirding many of their concerns is the reality of race. Morris’ student body is 82% Black, and its community members said its potential closure was another indicator of the major impact the district’s plan would have on Black families. Bache-Martin in Fairmount, poised for significant financial support, has only about 34% Black students.
“When closures disproportionately affect minority communities, we cannot pretend race is not a part of this story. … What message are we sending to our students, my fifth- and sixth-grade students, when [the] place that nurtured them is going to disappear?” Adrienne Ramsey, a math teacher at Morris, said at the community meeting.
Freeman insisted that there must be a public education option for elementary school students in the neighborhood. She said she is concerned that charter schools, which are privately run and publicly funded, do not have enoughpublic oversight, and public schools are critical tocommunities.
“Schools are one of the places that the real community building and community weaving starts,” she said.
She said shebelieved interest in a public elementary school in the Brewerytown-Sharswood area would return, particularly as incoming residents occupying the new developments look for places to send their childrenand current neighbors reconsider their education options.
“People want to be part of their communities. They want to be part of their neighborhoods. They want their children to have friends whose home they can walk to,” she said.
University of Pennsylvania health expert Ezekiel Emanuel’s casual conversations often evolve into impromptu medical consultations.
People askEmanuel — an oncologist, bioethicist, and health policy scholar who helped write the Affordable Care Act — how to live healthier.
He said that “incessant asking” inspired him at a time when both information and misinformation are booming in the wellness space.
His new book, “Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life,” landed on bookshelves in January. He uses the pages toargue that the goal of life should not be to simply live the longest, but rather to lead a healthy and fulfilling life.
The Penn professor, who has antique maps in his office and has taught a course on Ben Franklin, weaves inhis appreciation for history throughout the book. Emanuel’s advicealso addresses contemporary issues such as vaccines and vaping. And hesharespersonal family stories involvinghis father (to whom the book is dedicated).
In one of his favorite anecdotes, he describes looking for a cheap car to buy with his bar mitzvah money. Thinking he found a great deal on a Volvo, Emanuel and his brother bought the car, brought it home, and realized it couldn’t go in reverse.
“My father says, ‘You guys are schmucks!’” he recalled.
That became the first of his six rules: “Don’t be a schmuck — avoid self-destructive risks.”
The Inquirer spoke with Emanuel about tips for livinga healthy life in a conversation lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why do you think wellness has become so big?
People feel like the world’s topsy-turvy. They’re not controlling it. It is controlling them. They want to assert control over the world, and one way they can do it is through wellness.
What have people gotten wrong about wellness?
Spending 10 hours a week on wellness, like some people recommend, is crazy. Just insane. You should not do that. You can spend two or three hours a week, get all the benefit you need, and focus your time on other things — your family, close friends, having a successful career, making the world better, making Philadelphia better. Those are the things that matter.
What does your first rule (Don’t be a schmuck) mean?
The first rule is, really, take reasonable risks, but not unreasonable risks.
The most dangerous thing most of us do in everyday life is turn the ignition on in our car. Driving is actually quite dangerous over a lifetime. And you have to compare the risk you’re willing to take to the risk of driving. I try to organize a chapter laying out unreasonable risks like BASE jumping [an extreme sport in which a person parachutes from a dangerous height]. Why is that so stupid? Well, look at the data. I try to make that assessment much more quantitative.
What is your second rule?
The importance of social relations.
It doesn’t get emphasized by almost anyone in the [wellness] field, and it’s vastly the most important for longevity, for health, and for happiness. We’ve got tons of data. There’s more than 3 million people who’ve been studied on the relationship between loneliness, social isolation, and ill health.
If you look at the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which started in the late 1930s, the single most important predictor of a long, healthy life with the fewest comorbidities is the number and quality of your social relationships.
Overall, a professor at Brigham Young University has summarized that being socially isolated is ‘like smoking 15 cigarettes a day.’
Tell us about your last four rules.
The third one is stay mentally sharp. If the body’s working fine, but cognitive decline has set in, that would be hell to me. I don’t want to live like that.
There are only a few people like Ben Franklin where it does not appear to decline at all. One of the things actually I learned after I finished the book is Franklin was the oldest person (aged 81) at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. He was still very nimble with his mind, able to put things together, to craft compromises and things.
Some of it’s obviously genes, but some of it’s also things you can do — what you can eat, how you exercise, your retirement, your strategies, social interaction, challenges, etc. The brain is a lot like muscle in that either you use it or you lose it.
The last three rules are the typical: eating well, exercising, and sleeping advice.
Are there things that you’d want the media to emphasize more when talking about wellness and health?
There are two really fundamental things on the ‘to do’ side for eating.
One is you should eat more fermented foods. Whether it’s yogurt or cottage cheese or aged cheeses or kimchi. It’s very important for the microbiome. In Philadelphia, one of our treasures is Di Bruno Bros.cheese shop. They have 200 cheeses on display. Go and get some cheese. It’s really good.
The other is that more than 90% of Americans don’t get enough fiber in their diet every day. You need to eat more fruits and vegetables. I start out every day by merging these two. This morning, I had a bowl of berries, or some kind of fruit, with yogurt, granola, and oats. I also added hemp hearts, which are high in protein, good fats, omega-3s and omega-6s. Then add a salad at dinner, and you pretty much have enough fruits and vegetables.
Can you explain the title of your book, “Eat Your Ice Cream“?
Ice cream is good. Dairy products are associated with higher height, especially if, early in life, you eat a lot of dairy. Second, [dairy consumption] is also associated with a lower risk of colorectal cancer, which is all in the news these days.
And most importantly, it’s about joy. It’s fun. Who doesn’t like ice cream? But it’s important to get good ice cream, not stuff with emulsifiers and fillers and all of that.
Have a little joy. It goes a long way toward making life lovely.
CLEARWATER, Fla. — Edmundo Sosa woke up one day in 2019 and decided to get married.
Sosa was a minor leaguer in the St. Louis Cardinals organization, playing in triple A for the Memphis Redbirds. It was just a random day in July, but he decided he couldn’t wait any longer to tie the knot with his girlfriend, Daira Vega.
And so that day, Sosa hired a photographer, found an officiant, and decided on a public park in Memphis where they could hold an impromptu ceremony.
“I just didn’t want to buy any more plane tickets,” Sosa, who is originally from Panama, said jokingly.
There was just one call left to make: to Adolis García, Sosa’s best friend and teammate on the Redbirds. García and his wife served as their witnesses for the spur-of-the-moment wedding, with García also acting as Sosa’s best man.
Now, the pair who consider themselves more like brothers than friends are teammates once again. García, 32, signed a one-year deal with the Phillies this winter to be the team’s everyday right fielder, and is sharing a clubhouse with Sosa, 29, for the first time since that 2019 season.
That December, García was traded to the Texas Rangers, where he spent the next five years. He won a World Series in 2023 and was named American League Championship Series MVP along the way. Sosa remained in the Cardinals organization until he was traded to the Phillies in 2022, and has developed into a key utility infielder and bench bat.
García said he called Sosa right away when the Phillies’ offer was on the table.
“I got very excited at that moment, because I thought and felt that we were going to be close again,” Sosa said through an interpreter. “We were going to be playing together again. So that brought a lot of fun memories that we had back in the years. We trained a lot together.
“We got better together, both as people and as players.”
Edmundo Sosa (left) and Adolis García always seem to be near each other at Phillies spring training.
Field 1
At Phillies camp, if you see one of Sosa or García, the other typically is not far behind. Their schedules most days are similar, and they have played together in all the same Grapefruit League games so far.
They remember clearly the day they met. It was at Field 1 at the Cardinals complex during 2017 spring training, and they were in the same hitting group. Sosa was turning 20 that March, and García, who had just defected from Cuba, was turning 24. (Their birthdays are four days apart.)
“We got along pretty fast,” Sosa said. “I mean, I think it was [former Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina] hitting that day, first one in the group, and another guy, and it was us, too. So we just introduced each other, chat a little bit, and then after that, we were just really close.”
That season, Sosa started the year in high A, and García had been assigned to double-A Springfield. Sosa hit .285 in 51 games, and earned a call-up to Springfield in June to join García. But it didn’t last long: In Sosa’s first game in double A, he broke his hamate bone. So instead of a grand reunion on the first day, all they did was go out to eat at Qdoba.
The next year at spring training in Jupiter, Fla., they shared a hotel room. They spent a lot of time hanging out, playing video games, and going to the beach.
Even after they were on separate clubs, they remained close. In 2021, Sosa wanted to spend the offseason training in the U.S. but didn’t have a place to stay. García welcomed him into his home, along with Sosa’s wife, Daira, who was pregnant with their daughter, Naya.
García is Naya’s godfather, and they share a birthday: March 2.
Sosa had to leave for spring training after Naya’s birth, while Daira stayed with García’s wife, Yasmarys, who helped her adjust to motherhood.
“I have never told him this,” Sosa said, “but I always was grateful for everything he did for my family during that time.”
Adolis García (right), who signed a one-year deal with the Phillies in the offseason, said Edmundo Sosa has “helped me get acquainted with the guys, and he’s helped let them embrace me too.”
Reunited
This offseason, Sosa and García trained together again in Tampa. García has been focused on plate discipline as he seeks to recapture his 2023 form, when he posted an .836 OPS and bashed 39 home runs. Phillies assistant hitting coach Edwar Gonzalez also visited García over the winter.
Already having a best friend in the clubhouse has helped García as he adapts to a new organization.
“It’s good for me, it’s good for us, too, because he’s helped me get acquainted with the guys, and he’s helped let them embrace me, too,” García said.
García has two children as well, and their families are just as close as they are. They often spend time together barbecuing, playing each other in FIFA — Sosa conceded that García is better — and listening to music.
They will briefly be separated when Sosa leaves this week to represent Panama at the World Baseball Classic. Panama will compete in Pool A in San Juan, Puerto Rico, alongside Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, and Canada.
It is a big year for both of them, as García and Sosa will be free agents at the end of 2026. Before that, though, they have a goal that would be all the more special if they could achieve it together.
“We share the same goal right now,” Sosa said. “For me, it is to go back to a World Series as a player, and for him, it is to win another one. I just think of it as a beautiful process that we get to live now, and we’re going to be supporting each other, pushing each other, and trying to make each other better during the season.”
