Calls to ban books have increased in Ohio, and across the country, in recent years. In 2023, the most recent year of data from the American Library Association, there were more than 40 attempts to ban more than 200 books.
Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Gun violence is a leading cause of death for young people in Ohio.
The problem is especially severe in Cuyahoga County, where the gun homicide rate is more than twice the state average.
Ed Newman enjoys his weekly drives, darting from hospitals in eastern Washington County to nursing homes on Ohio’s southern border. He sees it as a scavenger hunt: each stop is a chance to find a discarded piece of medical equipment.
“It’s too important not to salvage that,” Newman said.
In the mid-1960s, James Brown was creating a new style of music — funk.
Instead of turning elaborate melodies, he turned his focus to syncopated rhythms with a strong emphasis on the down beat.
“Like James Brown says, funk is on the one,” said David Webb.
Research suggests the concentration of microplastics in Lake Erie rivals the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The particles are present in all five Great Lakes, but there’s no coordinated, region-wide effort to monitor the pollutant.
For decades, students at Upper Arlington High School walked across their campus, unaware of the history buried beneath their very own feet. The land—now home to classrooms and athletic fields—once held the graves of Black Ohioans who built businesses and communities despite the denial of basic civil rights.
In the 1960s, the Swartzentrubers — one of the most conservative subgroups of Old Order Amish — worked out a deal with the Ohio government: instead of marking their vehicles with an orange slow moving vehicle emblem and bright battery-operated blinkers, they would instead stick reflective tape on their buggies and use kerosene lanterns as headlights.
That agreement stood for decades.
At the end of February, Port Clinton residents hold a bonfire like no other in the state: they set a 30-foot snowman on fire.
It’s the Ohio city’s way of saying goodbye to the bitter cold of winter, and a nod to the famed “Burning Man" festival, hosted in the blistering heat of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
Virginia Harewood was eight years old in 1954 when the Supreme Court Case Brown v. Board of Education supposedly ended segregation in schools. But despite that, her elementary school in the southwestern city of Hillsboro was still divided.
