News & Opinion

An unlikely but passionate rift has heated up in a Southern Indiana school district over the concept of prom events for opposite- and same-gender student pairs. First, Diana Medley, a special education teacher in the Northeast School Corporation in Sullivan County, made remarks to a WTWO-TV (Terre Haute) reporter that set the Internet and regional and even national media atwitter. Outside of a planning meeting for a strictly opposite-sex-dating prom in the school district, she said, in response to the interviewer’s question about whether she thinks gay people have “some purpose in life”: “I don’t. I personally don’t, I’m sorry. I don’t understand it.” In the same TV news report, Bill Phegley, a pastor at Carlisle Christian Church, makes statements considered incendiary by some and to be treasured by others, saying Christians are always “prepared for a fight” and that Jesus gives them “armor for the front, not the back” so as not to run away from that fight.

I was hiking in the woods this past fall and stepped on a snake. It was an Inland Taipan, the most toxic snake in the world. One bite can emit enough poison to kill 250,000 mice, or 100 humans—provided they’re not obese, in which case it would only kill 50 or so. It is a shy reptile, once found only in central Australia. But due to global warming, it is now found in Orange County, Indiana, where I stepped on it.

Over the last couple of years, I have seen, in person, the following performers: Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett, Joan Rivers, Jackie Mason, Garrison Keillor, Candice Bergen, Bill Cosby, Angela Lansbury, and James Earl Jones. Common among these celebrities is “maturity,” and, pardon the insensitivity, plenty of it. In fact, rough math indicates that their combined age approximates the 700-year-old mummy recently discovered in China.

Most of this magazine’s staffers are born-and-bred Hoosiers. Many attended college at IU, or Purdue, or Ball State. And now they’ve settled here, too, to work and play. This is a place where people stay (or return). The native knowledge of our readers is something we think about a lot when picking which stories to cover—and especially as we planned this month’s “Hidden Indy” (p. 44 in the print issue).

Photo courtesy Indiana Pacers

We’re already well into this droll, sporty, and yet downright painful 2013—St. Elmo and soccer and Lance, oh my—and so here, without further ado and based on pageviews, are the top 12 stories of 2012 at IndianapolisMonthly.com as determined by you, our readers:

Two anonymous Indianapolis doctors might have been among the first to learn that the storybook career of cyclist Lance Armstrong was more cautionary tale than legend. At least, that’s according to a 2006 affidavit from one of Armstrong’s former teammates, Frankie Andreu, delivered to the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Andreu rode with Armstrong from 1992 until 1996, as a member of Motorola’s racing team. In the 15-pag

Walking around downtown Washington, D.C., on Monday morning amidst the crowds of inauguration-goers, it was difficult to tell who hailed from where—and then there was the man in a Purdue hat who said “Boiler Up!” with a big smile in response to my companion who initiated that exchange. Yet I learned ahead of time that there would be more than a few other Hoosiers in attendance, including performers in the parade after the official swearing in of President Barack Obama:

Dear Members of the 118th Indiana General Assembly,

Lauren Spierer’s parents, Robert and Charlene, recently spoke with People magazine to reveal the stark, harsh reality of living without their daughter. What seems like minutiae to some, small things, will bring back the pain of losing their daughter—so much so that, according to People, Spierer’s boxes from her time at college remain unpacked. Today, January 17, 2013, is significant for them: It marks the day on which Spierer either hopefully celebrates her 22nd birthday—somewhere, somehow—or would have celebrated the occasion.

Florida likes the way Tony Bennett, Indiana’s uprooted Superintendent of Public Instruction, thinks: teacher evaluations based on student performance, schools receiving grades on the same scale used for their charges, and the headline-grabbing push for more charter education and voucher programs. The Sunshine State apparently longed for his leadership and initiative, offering him the reins to clean up its education system in the midst of his term as the Hoosier State’s public schools czar. The Floridian version of the role boasted a salary that tripled his own in Indiana.

Editor’s Note: Indiana governor Mitch Daniels rides into the sunset this month, trading his gubernatorial duties for presidential powers (to a degree) as Purdue University’s leader. Here, Evan West’s June 2005 conversation with the biker-in-chief. Here in Indiana, we like things that go fast. I’m no different. The first motorcycle I ever rode belonged to […]

In the middle decades of the 20th century, every community had a draft board, composed of local citizens whose responsibility was to interview young men and discern their fitness for military service. As you can imagine, it was not a wildly popular practice. And when young men stopped cooperating by shooting themselves in the foot, the practice ended.

For this month’s “What I Know” column, we asked WTHR meteorologist Chuck Lofton for his life wisdom, and after almost 28 years with the same TV station, he’s accumulated quite a bit. That kind of workplace longevity, though, is becoming rarer than a full 401(k) match. I recently read a study alleging that “Millennials”—those 30 and younger, otherwise known as Generation Y—change jobs every two years on average. I keep cheap pens longer.

To understand the chasm currently separating Indiana’s political parties, all you need to do is picture their election-night celebrations. On November 6, the Democrats chose a sedate ballroom at the Downtown Marriott. The Republicans, who were marching toward supermajorities in the House and the Senate, chose the end zone at Lucas Oil Stadium.