The Young Emerging Writers will celebrate the release of The Atlas on Friday, August 30. The Atlas is a literary magazine put together by 11 interns, ranging from 15 to 19 years old, that includes poems, short stories, comics, and other writings by the interns and people they asked to submit work. The party will start at 7 p.m. in the third-floor conference room of the Bucktown Center for the Arts in downtown Davenport. Copies of the issue will be distributed free (while supplies last), and the magazine's contributors will read selections from the issue. This event is part of the Bucktown Final Friday series, which begins at 6 p.m.

Oil, soil, copper, and forests are forms of wealth. So are factories, houses, and roads. But according to a 2005 study by the World Bank, such solid goods amount to only about 20 percent of the wealth of rich nations and 40 percent of the wealth of poor countries.

So what accounts for the majority? World Bank environmental economist Kirk Hamilton and his team in the bank's environment department have found that most of humanity's wealth isn't made of physical stuff. It is intangible. In their extraordinary but vastly under-appreciated report, Where Is the Wealth of Nations? Measuring Capital for the 21st Century, Hamilton's team found that "human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries."

When the Quad Cities Community Vitality Scan was released this spring, it marked a welcome collaboration between five community organizations, but it was still easy to dismiss it as yet another study, one more evaluation of where we are.

What's potentially different about the Vitality Scan, though, is how those organizations plan to use it. If the five groups - the United Way of the Quad Cities Area, the Quad City Health Initiative, the Moline Foundation, the Community Foundation of the Great River Bend, and the Amy Helpenstell Foundation - can use the Vitality Scan and related efforts to guide their funding decisions, this is one study that could actually address community needs and shortcomings on a large scale.

People interested in writing in the Quad Cities might look at the list of organizations that offer classes in dance, music, art, and theatre and wonder: What about me?

For better or worse, there's only one organization in the Quad Cities that offers writing instruction to the community at-large: the Midwest Writing Center.

Most visibly, the organization hosts the David R. Collins Writers' Conference each summer.