Among bike advocates, there's a sense of excitement, of possibility. Plans are being made, visions laid out, funding sought. The question to ask right now isn't whether Philadelphia can be a good bike city — it already is. The question is whether Philadelphia can be a great bike city.

On the warm Saturday night of April 25, an unusual spectacle unfolded at 40th and Walnut streets, the heart of the west end of Penn's campus. Starting sometime around 9 p.m., the intersection began to fill suddenly with hundreds of teenagers.

Like the mayor, Council proposes that we raise the sales tax by 1 percent, but for five years instead of three. Of course, without the property tax hike, the plan falls about $270 million short. Council's plan? To borrow. From the future.

Mayor Nutter believes that high wage and business taxes have long been stifling the city, and that the economic progress we've made is thanks to their gradual reduction. But he doesn't see these views as mere articles of faith. He sees the dangers of raising wage and business taxes as facts of science.

God knows I try to get away from them. Since my first casino story in Philadelphia, a piece on Foxwoods' proposed move to Chinatown, I've written about all manner of non-casino-related topics: taxi unions, drug corner payphones, radical Christians, Obama's inauguration ... but I keep coming back.

When Judge Idee Fox ordered that libraries remain open, opponents of the closures rejoiced. And though Nutter fought back, appealing the ruling and indicating that he'd replace closings with cuts, he eventually backed down on both fronts. The mayor, in other words, learned his lesson. But is it the right one?

In the last 10 years, Kensington has become the epicenter of a new movement of young Christians, many of them from mainstream Evangelical backgrounds. But this new movement doesn't fit the classic categorization. A better way to put it is that they are rejecting old labels for a Christianity that is both intensely religious and refreshingly open-minded.

Amidst all the furor of the Library Wars, the public — and, more culpably, the media — completely overlooked a $1.3 million cut to the Office of Supportive Housing (OSH), which oversees all city-funded homeless services.

Whether Wright, the Chawlas and Teitelman are guilty depends not just on what they did, but on who they are and what they were thinking.

"The governor says he wants $550 million a year — that's 50 percent [of gambling machine revenues] ... about $1.1 billion flowing across the commonwealth. You don't think that's attractive to organized crime?"