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Mississippi Today · Sep 16, 2026
Twenty-five years after his death, Julian Rankin reports on Better Together – the effort Josh McManus helped organize to find a permanent home for more than 400 of the Rural Studio founder’s drawings, models, paintings and journals, many never shown in public.
Read the story at Mississippi TodayFifteen months into his term, Mayor John Horhn told the city “Jackson is rolling” – roughly 2,500 potholes filled a month with Hinds County, crews working through hundreds of illegal dump sites, and Adopt a Block microgrants for neighbors who keep their streets clean.
In June, Better Together took representatives of major museums on a four-day trip through the Deep South – including Canton and the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson – as part of the push for a permanent home for Mockbee’s work.
A working studio on Capitol Street, inspired by Mockbee’s Rural Studio, that puts students and recent graduates from Mississippi State, Jackson State and Millsaps on three downtown priorities: Capitol Street, 100 small businesses and “Tools for Cranes.”
Jeanne Whalen and Paul Overberg report that decades of migration away from the Rust Belt have begun to reverse, with Akron among the metros turning losses into gains.
Citing Redfin and Zillow data, WLBT reported Jackson home values up 32.4% year over year — the largest jump in the metro.
The East Palo Alto City Council voted unanimously to advance the Civic Commons — a new library, City Hall, police headquarters and athletic field — anchored by a $20 million city allocation and a public-private funding plan.
Nate Berg on the 3,600-square-foot schoolhouse in Stanton, Tennessee – population 415, next door to Ford’s BlueOval City – being turned into the Ford Community Center, after more than 2,500 hours of community meetings led by M|B|P before any investment was made.
Wyatt Emmerich asks Josh McManus what Jackson can take from Chattanooga and Detroit – blight, downtown, jobs, getting public and private leaders to the same table – and why Mississippi’s future runs through its capital city.
Josh McManus sits down with host Paul Wolf of Visit Jackson’s Soul Sessions — on decades of work in cities like Detroit and Chattanooga, the Jackson Rising effort, and Better Together, the project to bring architect Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee’s vision to life.
Josh McManus joins host Grant Callen for a long conversation on the rise, decline and revitalization of American cities — why Jackson’s challenges are not unique, what Jackson Rising set out to do, and how the Chastain campus can help anchor a neighborhood’s renewal.
Josh McManus’s keynote to the Greater Jackson Chamber — the case for where Jackson has been, the turn underway, and what the city could be by 2050.
Joel Steinhaus on lining up the market mission with the moral one – why a purpose every employee can state works like infrastructure, why it has to be as measurable as the financials, and why it gets scarcer as AI takes over the task work.
And the origins of our discontent — three sources standing in the way of the Right to Rise: collapsing community, comparison culture, and Crapitalism.
Thirty years of lessons from the front lines — four core ideas for making place-based change, starting in Chattanooga.
A meditation on America’s birthday — the belief that each generation should have a real shot, not a theoretical one, at doing better than the one before it.
A million miles on American asphalt, chasing opportunity and purpose — and what it takes to keep moving in places the economy left behind.
If your place has a hard site or a hard problem, that’s the work we do.
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