When the Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School gymnastics team competes in the Ohio High School Athletic Association state gymnastics meet, they’re expected to win. That’s because they’ve won each year—since 2004. And as the streak builds, there’s more pressure each year on the public school’s team to continue that tradition. No year was more tense than the year that they were hoping to take home their 20th straight title.

Using forms as diverse as journal entries, cell phone texts, children’s picture books, and erasure poems, LeMay wrestles with questions of illness, isolation, identity, grief, family, and love because, like so many us, he’s had to live them. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2017 when his first child was a little over a year old. He learned during the worst month of the COVID-19 pandemic that his 80-year-old father, unable to breathe, had been admitted to the emergency room in the middle of the night. Would he live? And if not? In these richly varied essays, LeMay helps us make our way, personally and collectively, through experiences that may be our last, all the while honoring those “firsts”—the first cry, the first word, the first day of school.

The Civil War was a watershed in public awareness of the many health-related issues soldiers faced while living in camps. Sanitarians among civilians and regular army officers attempted to meet those challenges by addressing a range of topics associated with preventive healthcare in the volunteer army. The US Sanitary Commission, a nongovernmental agency sanctioned by the Federal government, created a massive campaign to study conditions in semipermanent camps and advise unit commanders how to avoid unnecessary illness and curb soldier deaths by disease. Commission inspectors, mostly civilian physicians, examined camps from 1861 to early 1864 and filed more than 1,400 reports of their findings.

In this latest volume, Tom Batiuk continues to explore the roots of comic books and newspaper comic strips and provides unique insight into the evolution of his own creative process. Beginning five years after the strip’s most recent time-jump, the Funky gang are now in their late forties and raising teenagers of their own. Batiuk continues the Starbuck Jones storyline from the previous volume, as Holly searches for the final five issues of the comic book to send to Cory in Afghanistan. Elsewhere, there is a memorable class reunion, the character of Mason Jarr is introduced, and the cast decamps to Hollywood as Lisa’s Story is about to be adapted into a movie.

While Pittsburgh is sometimes held up as a successful example of urban reinvention in the era after heavy industry (think “eds and meds”), its transition away from steel has in fact been uneven and contested. Christopher P. Briem grew up in the city’s Bloomfield and South Side neighborhoods watching that process. Now a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh, he has spent many years working in multiple registers to document economic change-through his academic research, as a public authority consulted nationally when Pittsburgh is in the news, and as a spirited participant in popular debates about what is still called the Steel City.

Long before the fashion industry formally addressed questions of sustainability and advocated for “slow fashion,” William and Elizabeth Phelps, a husband-and-wife design duo, were already working to create handcrafted leathergoods and functional women’s sportswear that could be worn for decades. Active from the 1940s to the late 1960s, Phelps Associates quickly won acclaim and found commercial success, attracting a broad clientele and becoming known for quality, utility, and craftsmanship.