JoAnn Greco

Fall 2024
And so, it seems, unhappy families are alike after all. It's true even in our most peaceable of kingdoms, as documented in Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church. For her newest book, Eliza Griswold, A&S '97 (MA), a pastor's daughter, Pulitzer Prize winner, and New Yorker contributing writer, spent four years immersed within a small evangelical church in Philadelphia devoted to social justice and community involvement.
The result is an intima...

DJ “Michael the Lion” (also a researcher and lecturer in the Weitzman School of Design) is a big believer in the nighttime economy.
The Japanese used to call it the floating world: hours of darkness when urban pleasure seekers tore the figurative veil from their public faces and partied at theaters and restaurants.
Michael Fichman GCP’16 GFA’16, a researcher and lecturer in urban spatial analytics at Penn’s Weitzman School of Design, more practically refers to this burning of the midnight oil...

For Douglas Mao, chair of JHU's English Department, the beautiful friendship started when he was asked to teach a class. Bioarchaeology instructor John Hessler's magnificent obsession flourished after David Bowie walked into the New York City bookshop where he worked. And Patrick Hastings, author of a new guide to the object of their mutual affection, fell hard in a different bookstore—this one in Paris and whose namesake is inextricably linked to its publication.
Three scholars, three memora...

Planning Magazine
The people and places that made modern-day Philadelphia through the career of its longtime planning commissioner (and father of actor Kevin Bacon).
Intersections The Profession
March 17, 2023
As head of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission (PCPC), Edmund N. Bacon, FAICP, seared his stamp on the nation's then fourth-largest city like no one since founder William Penn in 1682. Beyond his long tenure — 1949 to 1970 — Bacon's vision remained Philadelphia's guiding force unt...

How some of the happiest countries make for a carefree cruise
JoAnn Greco
·8 min read
“Happy birrrrthday!” exclaimed Chef Jes Paskins in his distinctive British accent, spreading his arms wide as I walked down the curving stairs of the Seabourn Ovation. At the previous evening’s First-Timers Cocktail Party, the ebullient Englishman—who serves as the ship’s executive chef—had sported a towering toque and moonwalked to the Weird Al Jankovic parody Eat It as he was introduced by Captain Andrew P...

Michael E. Mann has been a central figure in the battle for the environment since the “hockey stick” graph made him a target for climate change deniers 25 years ago. Now on Penn’s faculty and heading the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, he’s fending off a new generation of “inactivists” comprised of climate change deflectors on the right and doomists on the left to get out the message that it’s still within our power to save the planet.
By JoAnn Greco | Illustration by Melin...

In The Stories We Wear, the Penn Museum probes humanity’s penchant for dressing up.

What do a melodramatic 19th-century Chinese opera star, a groundbreaking 20th-century contralto, and a flamboyant 21st-century drag queen have in common? For one thing, a penchant for show-stopping shades of red and fuchsia. Their lavish gowns—velvets and satin, sequins and lace—triumphantly introduce The Stories We Wear, on view at the Penn Museum through June 12. It’s fitting that this sartorial trio appears...

When historic preservation meets modern restaurant design.
Almost two decades ago, architect Richard Stokes GAr’88 spent a long weekend in Paris with interior designer Shawn Hausman. Together, they visited a dozen or so eateries, not so much to sample steak frites and pot de crème, but to photograph brass railings and zinc bars. Having gone to France on a mission for a client, they spent hours rummaging through flea market bins and trolling auction houses, emerging with enough stuff to fill a...

uhammad Ali was always larger than life, but encountering him in the middle of a sunlit barn in the Philadelphia suburbs is especially startling. That’s partly because he’s split in half.
Head slightly tilted, his gloved fists are poised to sting like a bee. The elastic waistband of his boxing shorts, clearly marked by the Everlast logo, rises above the table upon which his torso rests. On a neighboring wood plank, planted in a wide stance, his boot-shod feet seem antsy, itching to dance in t...

JoAnn Greco is a Philadelphia-based freelance journalist who writes on travel, architecture, design and culture. In addition to regularly contributing articles to AAA magazines and dozens of other publications, she is the editor in chief of Modern Luxury’s Interiors Philadelphia Magazine.

Sidebar | An archaeological dig reveals Black Bottom history in “What Lies Beneath.”
itting on a sofa in her West Philadelphia living room, Carol Pettis folds her hands in her lap and smiles politely at the prospect of being interviewed. Suddenly, though, her face breaks into a broad smile.
“I’m so happy,” the 74-year-old retiree says. “I’m just so happy with this program. When I first heard about it, I thought it was a scam. I thought, somebody is trying to take my house away!”
The program s...

A new Penn study digs into the science behind baseball’s “magic mud.”
As a principal investigator at the Penn Soft Earth Dynamics Lab (Penn SED), Douglas Jerolmack has studied everything from the flow of rivers to the shifts of dunes. But his latest research project really knocked it out of the park.
Seeking to understand the secret sauce behind the celebrated “magic mud” that professional pitchers apply to baseballs to improve their grips, Jerolmack and his research colleagues at Penn’s Scho...

Thursday, November 7, 2013; By JoAnn Greco · 0 COMMENTS. In a leisurely meeting that saw a modest proposal for...

Mar 4, 2013 ... “I can't reveal what it is just yet,” he says, “but it will also be about...

With its large Japanese expat population and thousands of Japanese American residents, New York has long offered sushi restaurants and...