Comedian Bill Maher said it last Friday night on live TV. Now, an official with the Genesee County Land Bank in Flint has resigned after an audio recording of him saying it was posted online. I am, of course, talking about each man’s use of the n-word.
Our story begins with a chance meeting in Buffalo at Nietzsche’s. It was a winter Sunday afternoon in 1988 and both of our groups were scheduled to play together.
Even though this is about a bird – miraculous blue jewel, transfiguration in a city backyard – it begins with a crash in the middle of the night.
It’s easy to mistake the Great Lakes for the ocean, at first. I’ve brought a few people to see Lake Michigan for the first time, and that’s what they all say: “It looks like the ocean!”
By G. M. Donley Americans sure love to vote for celebrities: Shirley Temple, Ronald Reagan, Bill Bradley, Jack Kemp, [...]
By Tim Carmody In 2016, I voted in my hometown, a Detroit suburb called Madison Heights. (It’s where the [...]
I was sitting at home on January 26, reading the news and having a hard time sitting still. The shock of a new president had not (and still has not) worn off, and story after story was pushing me toward a deeper sense of despair. It was far beyond politics—I grew up in rural Michigan, and Republicans are not foreign, scary creatures to me.
When I moved to Phoenix three years ago I expected to feel disconnected from my Midwestern roots. But it turned out a lot of Chicago had made its way here.
What’s in a name? In my neighborhood, confusion. Countless lifelong Greater Clevelanders have asked me, “So what part of town do you live in?” and I always begin my answer, “Well, the city calls it ‘Brooklyn Centre,’ but...”
I wasn’t having any of it. My mother brought my older sister and me to Chapel Hill Mall each year to visit with Archie the Talking Snowman. But I wasn’t fooled. Snowmen don’t talk, and I didn’t trust the disembodied voice that floated from above.
At the intersection of State and Washington Streets in the Warehouse District of downtown Peoria, a city of about 116,000 that sits halfway between Chicago and St. Louis on the Illinois River, stands a nine-foot-tall bronze likeness of the city’s most infamous native son.
To visit Slavic Village, preferably wait until a bitterly cold evening in February, and in the dark and the snow, take the I-77 North exit for Pershing Avenue. Turn west, and as the road becomes a dead-end, ignore the sparseness of the streetlights and the horrifying industrial shapes rearing up from the barbed-wire fences on either side of you.