Essays
Do Suburbs Make City Kids Poorer?
When I was in high school, a teacher once asked my class to use a word or term to describe the United States. A classmate of mine said it was “a meritocracy.”
Report From Flint: Don’t Call It “Katrina”
The drive from Lansing to Flint is relatively easy, a straight shot along I-69. It’s a drive I first made in August 2008 after accepting a teaching job at the University of Michigan-Flint.
Caring For All Parts: Hadad Farm
On the east side of Detroit sits an old two-story house washed sky blue. The paint is chipped and the windows are barred with thick grey metal. It is my grandmother’s house of over fifty years.
Not Just Another Soup Kitchen: Inside the Flint Community Cookout
“Hey, man, he got a spot,” says Kenny Lucas, pointing his thumb toward Dallas Schiestel, as another man joins the growing party in Riverbank Park, waiting for the Flint Community Cookout to begin.
Police Story
The record store was about two miles from our neighborhood and about one mile beyond the city limits. As teenagers a friend and I would go there whenever we had a little money ...
Rust Belt Vehicle Love
I saw a dinosaur carcass the other day in the driveway of an abandoned house on a side street off St. Clair Avenue. It was a dark green Ford LTD with a tattered brougham roof peeled back to the rusted metal.
Keep Us In The Loop, Rust Belt
I was intrigued when my old friend Bill told me he had gotten a new job as an editor at a magazine based in Cleveland. I was more intrigued when he told me the title of the magazine and its subject matter -- the “Rust Belt.”
From One Rust Belt to Another
“I’m going to be working from Germany for the summer,” I told everyone this April. “Ooh, Berlin?” was the universal reply. “No,” I would reply, savoring the weirdness of the word I was about to pronounce: “Gelsenkirchen.”
Riding Alone: Or, So Long, Slow Roll
During the years I lived away from Detroit, group bicycle rides became a popular pastime in my hometown. When I moved back, I gave such outings numerous tries ...
Why I’m Not Watching the Browns
The Browns are on. There was a time when that meant I would have been on the couch in front of the TV or in a sports bar in front of a TV or at a friend’s house in front of a TV.

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