The Wall Street Journal's Homes section catches up with Kaywin Feldman, the former director of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, to take a look at the home she shares in Minneapolis with her husband, architecture professor Jim Lutz. While in Memphis, the couple had fixed up the striking Seagle house on Poplar across from Overton Park. Looking around for something similar modern in the Twin Cities, Feldman made an interesting choice:

When Kaywin Feldman moved here to take a job as the director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, she knew it would be difficult to replace her home in Memphis. Designed by a student of famed architect Louis Kahn, it was a 1950s-built midcentury modern that she and her husband, Jim Lutz, an architecture professor, had worked to restore and improve over nine years.

After looking at nearly 30 homes, Ms. Feldman finally found another modern house with a boxy exterior and glass walls. But this one had a different provenance. Constructed five years ago in a Wisconsin factory and installed in a few weeks on-site, it was a "weeHouse," one of a series of prefabricated homes designed by local architects Geoffrey Warner and Scott Ervin of Alchemy Architects.

At 2,900 square feet, the four-bedroom, three-bathroom house is one of the largest of the series--the couple jokingly refer to it as their "not so wee house." Located in the Linden Hills neighborhood, which is lined with more-traditional early 20th-century homes, the house is made up of four glass-and-cedar modular units stacked just slightly off-center, with small cantilevers, topped by a flat roof.

The couple say they like the low upkeep of the weeHouse compared with their architecturally significant fixer-upper in Memphis. They're also enjoying more privacy these days:

For the glass wall overlooking the street, Ms. Lutz insisted on installing window coverings, strung on simple hospital-track metal fixtures, for privacy. At their previous home, which overlooked a city park, "I would sometimes have someone come up to me and say, 'Oh, I saw you getting a book off the shelf,' " she recalled. "I said, 'When we move here, I want drapes and I want them now.' "

Don't miss the slideshow with pictures of the interior and the exterior of the weeHouse.

Financial Post has an article today examining the question of who might succeed FedEx chairman and CEO Fred Smith when he finally leaves the $27 billion company he founded. Smith once indicated he might leave by 2013, but he now says he has no plans to leave any time soon.

"I'm extremely concerned," said Ron Wickens, FedEx's former vice president for strategic projects and a shareholder. "Who is that replacement? And does he have the vision that Fred Smith has?"

Smith's eventual successor at Memphis, Tennessee-based FedEx will face the burden of following a pioneering CEO, said John Haber, executive vice president of the transportation division at Atlanta-based NPI LLC, which helps clients manage supply-chain costs. That means he or she will have to figure out what to change to build on the company's success.

FedEx has "good bench strength, but their bench strength, they're not visionaries like Fred Smith," said Haber, who previously worked at competitor United Parcel Service Inc. "What is at risk is, 'What is the next great idea?'"

The article also tosses out a few names as possible successors for Smith's CEO title. It appears that this would be an internal hire or someone who has been groomed to step in.

Possible candidates for Smith's CEO job include Chief Financial Officer Alan Graf and Mike Glenn, executive vice president of market development and corporate communications, according to Ross and Satish Jindel, president of SJ Consulting Group Inc. in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. Dave Rebholz, the head of FedEx Ground, and Dave Bronczek, who leads Express, also are potential choices, Jindel and Ross said.

The National League of Cities' website carries an item about Memphis Mayor AC Wharton's participation in a recent Mayors' Institute on Children and Families workshop on increasing college attainment among cities' adult workforces.

The four participating mayors and their staff and local partners shared similar concerns. Too few workers have the educational attainment and skills needed to obtain well-paying jobs in fast-growing industries, such as advanced manufacturing, bioscience, renewable energy and health care. Moreover, each city struggles with racial, ethnic and economic inequalities in access to postsecondary education.

Wharton has been on board on this issue most recently with a $1.7 million grant from between the Plough Foundation and a partnership with Leadership Memphis to help about 200,000 adults in the Memphis-area adults complete their degrees. The mayor himself provided another anecdote on his work in this area during the workshop, which also included Wharton's counterparts from Salt Lake City, Louisville and Berkeley, Calif.

Mayor Wharton held up the example of a local brewery struggling to find qualified workers that partnered with a Southwest Tennessee Community College to offer specialized training that met their employment needs. 

The article also mentions this appalling statistic, which helps explain why Memphis has so many adults who haven't completed their postsecondary education:

Of the 70 percent of students who graduate from Memphis City Schools, only four percent of those students are considered to be ready for college.

The Atlantic followed up this week on the inspiring story of the Memphis "Fly Boys" -- Wooddale High aviation students Wesley Carter and Darius Hooker -- who competed recently in the elite Team America Rocketry Challenge. In an article titled "Meet the 'Fly Boys' of Memphis, the Future of American Education," writer Brian Reskin places the accomplishments of Carter and Hooker in the context of policy efforts to increase the number of students pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- the "STEM" fields. Reskin asks: What counts for their success?

In the face of the recession and declining numbers of skilled technical workers, a key piece of the Obama administration's education plan is a renewed emphasis on Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs, just like the one Carter and Hooker attended at Wooddale. Today's CTE programs are not the vocational curricula of the past, which focused solely on trade education. They include college prep as well, giving students more options after graduation. To fund them, the Education Department is calling for the renewal and retooling of the Perkins Act. The act was last renewed in 2006, under President Bush, but Obama wants to push it further, calling for increased collaboration between high schools, colleges, industries, and states.

"It seems very clear that when you give young people an opportunity like at Wooddale High School to engage in this kind of learning, it turns something on," James Stone, director of the National Research Center for Career & Technical Education, tells me. "I truly believe this, even though I can't point to empirical evidence that's research based."

In the end, the boys' rocket launch was unsuccessful, but they already have inspired the younger members of the school's aviation program:

Although disappointment hangs on their faces, Hooker and Carter are well versed in science and know that failure is just an opportunity to learn. "The center of gravity may have been off on it to give it that spiral," Hooker says. "It's not the end, there's still a lot of work to be done, a lot of knowledge to be passed on, but this is capping it off for us seniors."

A reader sent in a tip this week that perhaps the winningest barbecue competitor of all time has decided to hang up his mop after this last weekend's 2012 Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. Pat Burke of Pat's BBQ in Murphysboro, Ill., "has won more barbecue titles and championships than any living person," according to an article in the Murphysboro American, which provides a detailed list of awards.

The Murphysboro native may not have hit a home run like Ruth, nor thrown a football like Unitas or dunked a basketball like Wilt, but he has done something they never even dreamed of -- cooked barbecue like no other human being.

Burke is a barbecue legend...a prodigy that comes along just once in a lifetime. But, like the great ones in other fields, there comes a time when even a master barbecuer has to hang up his brush and step away from competing and begin enjoying the fruits of their labor. And that time has come for Pat Burke.

Pat's last competition was this month with Memphis In May. For now on, you'll see him spending time with his family and still working at Pat's BBQ, which he founded.

Almost sounds like it'd be worth the drive up to Southern Illinois ...

On The New York Times' In Transit travel blog, New Orleans-based photojournalist Pableaux Johnson sends a "Postcard: Memphis" from this past weekend's Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. His subject, the Fatback Collective, a culinary "dream team" that made the finals last year in the whole-hog division, was competing in its second MIM contest.

Members of the Fatback Collective, an all-star team of Southern chefs and pitmasters, competed in their second Memphis in May Barbecue World Championship last weekend. The eclectic team brought together a wealth of culinary knowledge and a healthy respect for American barbecue traditions, including the heritage-breed pigs raised by small-scale farms. The members gathered in Memphis to smoke three pigs for competition in the "whole hog" category.

The hogs spent about 24 hours over smoldering hickory, leaving plenty of time for the team members to consider the sauce that would be served alongside their contest entry. Each member concocted his own version for consideration. The chef Sean Brock of Husk and McCrady's restaurants in Charleston, S.C., fine-tuned his sauce before the team tasting on Friday afternoon.

On The Huffington Post, Chicago newspaper columnist and "Bobblehead Dad" author Jim Higley writes about his first experience competing in the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. He and some fellow journalists got hooked up with North Carolina barbecue star Chris Lilly to cook as the Kingsford "On Asswinement" team.

My grilling skills -- on the experience thermometer -- fall somewhere between steak tartare and rare. I'm our team's grilling newbie. But that doesn't matter. Because Team Kingsford has Chris Lilly.

We've just finished day one of an intensive two day grilling boot camp Chris put together for us to master our category -- ribs. We're being schooled not only in the art and science of competitive grilling, we're also being given an crash course in competing at a world-class level. And right now, my brain is overcooked. Well done. I'm hanging out in my hotel room at the famed Peabody Hotel -- above the sounds from Beale Street below, trying to process what all I learned today.

Higley wraps up the first in his series of dispatches with a couple of nice "random thoughts":
 

• Barbecue people are like country music people. The best.

• Memphis knows how to put on a show.

The Smoking Section is giving an advance look at the new Nike Air Penny 5 "Orlando," the latest basketball shoes in the signature line of former Treadwell High national player of the year, Memphis Tigers great and NBA All-Star Penny Hardaway. In the mid-'90s, Hardaway, starred in a classic series of Nike TV ads with a smack-talking marionette doll named Lil' Penny (pictured), voiced by Chris Rock. His latest Air Penny shoes pays tribute to his time with the Orlando Magic, his career peak. The black color with blue trim would work for a Memphis Tigers player. Lately, Hardaway has been working on a host of community improvement initiatives in the Memphis area, most recently a plan to build a $20.5 million indoor youth sports facility. Here's what The Smoking Section has to say (yes, I am old enough to remember ;):

If you're old enough to remember, at one point people thought Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway was going to be the next BIG player in the few years following Michael Jordan's first retirement. Sadly, the Memphis-raised Magic superstar's flame never fully blazed. Penny was plagued with injuries and never really accomplished what many hoped he would. The one thing Penny did manage to capitalize on was getting a pretty popular signature sneaker line with Nike. This year a brand new, fifth model - dubbed the Air Penny 5 - will be hitting stores. This Orlando inspired colorway has yet to get a release date so stay tuned for more information as it becomes available.

Rhodes College economics professor and Forbes.com columnist Art Carden is leaving Memphis to take a position on the faculty at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., and today he dedicates his column to all the things that he and his family will miss about our city. Rhodes was Carden's first academic job out of graduate school, so Memphis will always have a special significance for him. He begins his appreciation -- for the city's restaurants, kid-friendly activities and Fellowship Memphis church, among other things -- by noting that Memphis is doing better these days even by Forbes, whose city rankings haven't always painted Memphis in a positive light:

Forbes catches occasional flack around town for ranking Memphis on its "most miserable cities" list.

It's not as miserable as you might think, though. We like Memphis, and it's improving; Jane Donahoe of the Memphis Business Journal notes that the city fell to #16 on the 2012 list from #6 in 2011, #3 in 2010, and #2 in 2009 and points out how city leaders have responded.

We're going to miss Memphis. We've had fun here, we've made a lot of friends here, and we started our family here. Here are a few things we're going to miss about Memphis, and a few things you should look for the next time you're here.

On modernistcuisine.com, the companion blog to the stunning four-volume cookbook set "Modernist Cuisine" (just $456.09 on sale at Amazon!), author Nathan Myhrvold recounts "My First Memphis in May." His story involves learning the finer points of competition-style barbecue from one of the masters: multiple-time Memphis in May barbecue champion, former Shelby County commissioner and local political gadfly and sometime-restaurateur John Willingham. Keep in mind that "Modernist Cuisine" explains the "molecular gastronomy" phenomenon in which food preparation seems to involve as much chemical engineering and conceptual art as actual cooking. It turns out that technology -- here in the form of Willingham's patented smoker -- is as important to a perfect slab of smoked pork ribs as it is to flavored foams and powdered oils.

We had about a three-hour phone inter­view in which I had to jus­tify that I was wor­thy of acquir­ing a cooker. He also had con­cerns about the rainy weather in Seattle, and how that would affect the cooker. In the end, I did get my cooker, and with it I made the best ribs I'd ever made. But they weren't as good as John's. So I tried again, and I tried again, and I called him on the phone. Clearly, I was not quite get­ting all the ele­ments together.

Exasperated, I said, "John, why don't I just come down to Memphis and maybe you can teach me."

He said, "Oh, that's great. Why don't you come down in May. We have a lit­tle con­test coming."

On my way there I thought, okay, I'm going to have a cou­ple hours of bar­be­cue instruc­tion, and then I'm going to go over to Beale Street and hear some jazz, and then maybe I'll tour Graceland, and then I'll go home. It'll be pretty straight­for­ward, a fun week­end. Well, it turned out his lit­tle con­test was the Memphis in May World Championship of Barbecue Cooking Contest.

John handed me an apron and said, "You're on the team; it's the only way you'll learn."