Plus, what we mean when we talk about defunding the police and where to get a good tamale in Midtown on Saturdays.

Dolly versus Marsha; Christmas lights at Shelby Farms, Memphis Zoo and the Botanic Garden; and Don Bryant’s Grammy nomination. 

This Thanksgiving is a brief but particularly fraught moment of decision, another unwelcome marker in Our COVID Year, may it manage to remain singular. 

Among Tennessee counties, the late vote didn’t change much, but some tightening in Shelby County meant that for the first time since 2000 – when Nashville’s Al Gore was on the ballot – Davidson County was actually more “blue” than Shelby. 

Putting BVOE in the Mid-South Coliseum remains Reyes’ dream scenario. And, yes, this seems far-fetched. But let me ask you this: What Mid-South Coliseum idea isn’t far-fetched?

Chris Herrington says he’s worried about kids going back to school, but worried about them not going back to school, and is rooting for SCS to find a safe way to do it. Plus, nine more opinions.

Historically, I’m an Election Day voter. This year, I’m planning to break precedent. We’re in a pandemic. Everything’s a little unsettled. Well, everything except my personal ballot, which will be short on truly contested races and even shorter on indecision.

It’s a truism that “all politics is local,” but perhaps a current truth is that all politics is exhaustingly national. With less than a month to go before the presidential election, it’s been hard to think about much else this week. So pardon me while I try to get it out of my system, from a Memphis-centric perspective. 

Reyes’ collaborated with more than 20 other Memphis artists to create the astounding “BVOE Quadrant 360” on the edges of Downtown Memphis. The multimedia artist launched and operated the late, lamented “Live From Memphis.”

Craft beer naming is an art, or at least an, um, craft, and one that the growing number of Memphis breweries take with proper seriousness. In honor of the Virtual Memphis Beer Festival, we take a spin through local brewery websites to ponder beer names present and past. 

If I’m reading the news correctly, playing high school football in Memphis amid a pandemic hasn’t just disrupted football, which was probably to be expected, but has disrupted school. In Collierville, a football-related outbreak didn’t just halt play. It switched the whole school to virtual learning for two weeks. 

With no clear national strategy for combating COVID-19, we’ve all sort of been rendered individual contractors in the field of public health.

For the Shell, the problem is the medium, not the message. Tagging has been a recurring issue. “When we’re sitting here empty, and it’s dark, I understand that it’s an empty canvas,” said Shell executive director Natalie Wilson.

The effort and cost it takes to pick up the litter left by these ahistorical Lost Cause organizations is a drag. I’m not here to tell Collierville what to do, but those Confederate markers will go away some day.

We're used to large-scale alterations underway on sites Downtown, but landscapes are also changing at some promising and high-profile properties farther East. 

Those who are showing up for the pandemic version of Elvis Week are getting a first look at new interactive exhibits – "Elvis Movie Match Game," "Elvis Yourself" – that will become permanent fixtures at the complex across from Graceland.

Some find it galling that the City Council pulled back a public referendum on the police residency question. I dunno, I’d say the point of representative democracy is to elect officials and ask them to deliberate and make informed judgments.

We’ve had more time to prepare for remote learning than we had in the spring. But there are complications that our spring pause did not present: new teachers for most, new schools for many, and a first school experience for some. 

Nothing this week has been more distressing than to glimpse the sprouting seeds of a familiar political battle, this time over school openings. It was awful enough to see mask usage amid a pandemic turned into a test of political fidelity. Please, not this time.

Several takeaways from Thursday's COVID briefing and the rise in cases. Among them: We're not as bad off as Florida, but we're bad enough that local and CDC officials are alarmed.

The good news about the Memphis mask ordinance so far: People aren't really freaking out about it. The bad news: Too many seem to be simply ignoring it.

Our rising coronavirus rates pre-date the protests – they correspond to our general loosening of restrictions and specifically to Memorial Day – and there’s no specific tracing evidence at the moment that ties cases to them. 

When people ask why protests in Memphis have been so different than in most other cities, they’re fishing for a compliment. But there’s one aspect that is never mentioned: They have been smaller than in most other cities. 

The public protests of the past week would seem to violate current health directives against mass gatherings of 50 or more. Given the cause for the gatherings, it would be a mistake for officials to use that as a pretext for breaking them up. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t worry about them.

If there’s a commonality among many who disagree about protest tactics as well as those who by profession are on the other side of a line, maybe it’s a care for the city. Defensive pride in place is a Memphis throughline, and it may be serving us here.