Best of Blog-Lebo - Michael Madison

In August 2005, I founded Blog-Lebo, a blog about Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. The blog’s informal motto was “The Pulse of Mt. Lebanon,” and it was the first social media site to focus on the town.

I didn’t grow up in Mt. Lebanon and didn’t attend Mt. Lebanon High School – unlike, then, what seemed like an overwhelming proportion of the town’s residents and a clear majority of the so-called “Powers That Be”: members of the town Commission, School Board, and long-time staff of the town itself. As a relative newcomer, I was fascinated by the community: by its charm, by its wealth and self-regard, by its place in the status economy of the Pittsburgh region, by its changing character, and by its lack of self-scrutiny. Mt. Lebanon is, on the whole, an extraordinarily pleasant and comfortable place to live. I also learned to be fascinated by the town’s anxieties, its dramas, and by its occasional outbursts of incivility.

I posted at Blog-Lebo from time to time until the end of 2009. A changing corps of blogging colleagues also posted to the blog, and two of them carried on the blog until mid-2013. The entire blog is still online.

My most interesting, distinctive, and sometimes provocative posts are collected below.