As thousands of visitors arrive in Kansas City this month for World Cup games, fan-fests, and watch parties, I’m sure many of them will find the land of friendly people, delicious barbecue restaurants, and festive city patios that they’ve heard about in listicles and travel features.

But I suspect many of them will also encounter a land where the air is thick with weed smoke and car exhaust, flashes with lightning bugs and heat lightning, and where the night buzzes with the sounds of motorcycles, music, fireworks, and occasionally, gunshots. A place where people will bend over backwards to give you directions or recommendations, but may run you off the road the moment you dip below their preferred speed limit. Even without knowing much of its history, it doesn’t take long to figure out that Kansas City is a complicated place.

Making sense of this region and exploring it on a deeper level is exactly what we tried to do with Kawsmouth over the years, especially in the era before World Series and Super Bowl glory gave way to new levels of self-celebration. Kansas Citians have been through a lot together, and the very real dangers of traffic, violence, and social disorder don’t cancel out the warmth, generosity, and goodness of its people. As I get older and my kids learn to drive, I find myself wanting more order, cleanliness, and predictability. But that’s not what Kansas City is or has ever been.

In Kansas City—whether you’re a visitor or a lifer—sometimes you needs to embrace the smoke, chaos, and complicated social forces that shape this place and make it what it is. Below are some of the most relevant and interesting explorations of Kansas City we published in our decade-plus run on Kawsmouth. I invite you to read any or all of them. And, of course, to undertake your own investigations. Here are a few of our favorites:

• An essay about how Kansas City became such a confusing term, and what’s in a place’s name.

• A trip back in time to an unlikely apex of Kansas City architecture, the old Monkey House.

• Achieving transcendent peace and visions of floods in the city’s most elegant cemetery.

• An appreciation of the city’s oldest continuously operating pub, The Peanut, which serves chicken wings so large they could have belonged to a pterodactyl.

• Decoding the symbols, statues, and shibboleth of the American Confederacy in Kansas City.

• An impressionistic account of working in the government storage caves of Lenexa.

• A fictitious illustrated account of Oscar Wilde’s 1882 visit to Kansas City.

• A tour of the old airport and an ill-fated attempt to turn it into a three-terminal pub crawl…

• …and then a journey a decade later on the very last flight out of that airport and the very first flight to arrive in the new one

• A poem tracing the arc of a life lived on Troost, the street famously known as Kansas City’s racial dividing line.

• A photo essay and written exploration of driving down Merriam Lane—an ordinary road in an ordinary city, and also a one-of-a-kind vein of urban character.

• A look at what happens in the City Market when birds overwhelm the power grid.

• A tribute to the Makers of Kansas City

The last one was not published on this site originally, but speaks to a specific time and place when many of us were beginning to realize the potential and possibilities of working, dreaming, and building things in Kansas City. Bold claims that, since their original proclamation, have largely proven to be true.

Even as Kawsmouth today is more of a time capsule than active engine of new content, the Kansas and Missouri rivers continue to surge toward the confluence for which this site is named. All of the above contributors are still actively writing, creating, and exploring. And I hope that you are, too. To quote the great Kansas City writer Maxine Clair’s description of the waters at Kaw Point: “such tides are not easily turned.”

-Lucas Wetzel, June 15, 2026