March 06, 2026

Can you guess what’s pictured above? Click the image to find out!

In case you missed the breathless headline in MLive in, uhh, January, this weekend we push our clocks ahead for Daylight Saving Time. That report, part of MLive’s strange obsession with this “story,” told readers that it was “time to prepare for Daylight Saving Time.”

Prepare how? Is there something we’re supposed to do? They also felt like this was big news last September and October last fall in advance of the clock shift in November. In that September report, the outlet told us it’s not “too early to start thinking about which clocks in your home, vehicle or elsewhere need to be reset.” Really?

Anyhow, here’s hoping you read this before the time change and aren’t thrown off on Sunday morning, lest you blame “the media.”

Your (real) news is here. A Smoothie King employee was fired after denying service to a Trump supporter, a Saline teen is about to go climb a very, very tall mountain, road construction season is coming, and the city thinks air sirens may be obsolete.

Oh! And a reminder: If you want to be quoted in this year’s City Guide telling us what you love about your neighborhood, go to this survey to offer thoughts for our upcoming annual City Guide.

This is last week’s most-clicked link.

– Steve Friess, editor

View of the Week

Grammar, shmammar. Courtesy: Susan Dettling

2 Big Things

Credit: Steve Friess

1

MAGA drama pours on A2 Smoothie King: The local drink franchise on Jackson Ave. became the center of an online furor after a pair of employees were recorded refusing to serve a couple because one of them wore a Trump hoodie. The company apologized, noted the employees had been fired by the franchisee, and said in a statement that “the local owner is also taking further action and enforcing mandatory retraining for all employees that outlines our guest experience standards.” The franchisee isn’t in the clear, though; he reportedly owns several Smoothie King locations and is now being targeted online by folks sympathetic to the fired employees. One of the former Ann Arbor employees has spent the past few days posting TikToks about the saga and tried to raise money on GoFundMe before the platform shut down her campaign.

2

Another data center moratorium: This time, it’s the City of Ypsilanti putting a sixty-day emergency halt on consideration of proposed facilities even though there are presently none pending. City leaders are worried that the former GW Kent location, a manufacturing plant on 10.8 acres that recently went up for sale, could draw interest from a data center developer. Meanwhile, U-M continues its public relations campaign to convince the public of the benefits of high performance computing in the face of opposition to the planned center the university wants to build in Ypsilanti Twp. with Los Alamos National Laboratory. While the current governor said nothing about data centers last week in her State of the State address, the issue is popping up in the campaign to replace her. Also, the U-M project in particular is raising a key question about whether universities even need zoning permission from local governments to do what they want on the land they own.

From the Observer

Graduate forward Yaxel Lendeborg came to U-M via the transfer portal. Credit: Marc-Grégor Campredon

Wolverines on the brink of Madness: The U-M men’s basketball team, which is expected to be a No. 1 seed in the upcoming NCAA tournament (although there are some doubters), was built by second-year coach Dusty May’s adept use of the transfer portal, Eli Trese writes. “I know people outside of our tribe will call our guys these derogatory names, ‘mercenaries’ and whatnot,” May says. “We have a group of guys that love playing with each other. They appreciate Michigan, and when you see how connected they are, I don’t know how you would classify them as guys playing just for money when they all sacrificed a great deal of money to do what they’re doing together.” Last night, the team eked past unranked Iowa to complete a regular-season feat not seen in the Big Ten in a half-century — an undefeated road record. The loss to Duke doesn’t count because it was at a neutral site, not another school’s home turf.

Two key WEMU figures to retire: The public radio station’s music director Michael Jewett and news director/Morning Edition host David Fair are leaving in June, both telling Davi Napoleon that they’re ready to move on. Both are over sixty and have decades at WEMU under their belts; Jewett tells Napoleon he doesn’t want to be “that old guy they’re keeping around.”

What She Said: Our advice maven offers thoughts to a local writer curious how to get their memoir published. “The good news?” Bree Stillwell writes. “There are more viable paths than ever for independent writers like yourself.”

Hit These Links

Legendary director Stanley Kubrick shot this and dozens of other stylish images around Ann Arbor while on assignment as a photographer for Look magazine in 1949. Courtesy: Library of Congress

Did you know Stanley Kubrick was once a magazine photographer who did a 1949 spread on Ann Arbor? If not, neither did virtually anyone until a U-M alum and Kubrick enthusiast last year found a collection of stills – most of them unpublished – in the Library of Congress’s archive.

Folks with Blue Cross Blue Shield plans are being warned that U-M hospitals and clinics in Ann Arbor may not consider the insurance as “in-network” come July, as the company and health system negotiate reimbursement rates.

U-M Law’s Innocence Clinic helped exonerate and liberate a wrongfully convicted Detroit man who served twenty-seven years in prison.

While some think the Ann Arbor City Council behaves like the mayor’s lockstep fiefdom, a study claims it actually has the “highest dissent rate nationwide” among 142 cities and counties analyzed.

Road construction season is almost upon us, so check out this handy rundown of projects city council has green-lit. Also worth noting is the reconstruction coming to the intersection of Ann Arbor–Saline Rd. and Ellsworth Rd. in Lodi Twp.

We’ll have to wait until at least 2027, though, for relief at the notoriously crash-prone State-Ellsworth roundabout.

Ann Arbor-area state senator Jeff Irwin wants the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, the only women’s prison in the state, shut down over problems with mold, medical care, and living conditions.

Former U-M football head coach Sherrone Moore denies he was aware of and ignored sexual assault allegations against one-time assistant coach LaTroy Lewis. Lewis, hired by the Atlanta Falcons on February 10 as an assistant coach, was fired last week after it emerged that AAPD is investigating a 2024 incident.

According to the Michigan Daily, the decision to sell booze at Michigan Stadium during football games has not resulted in public safety mayhem. It has been quite profitable, too.

The Pentagon, having cut ties with several top universities and institutions — including five Ivy League schools — for a prestigious fellowship program, included U-M on its short list of potential new partner institutions.

A Saline teenager wants to be the youngest female to climb Europe’s tallest mountain. She’s already scaled Mount Kilimanjaro.

Ann Arbor scientist and activist Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, who is in Tehran caring for her elderly parents as the U.S. and Israel bomb the country, tells MLive the Trump administration has “lied about Iranian capabilities. They have lied about Iran being a threat to the United States.”

Three Arbor One buildings, totalling seventy-five apartment units, are again fit for human habitation.

EMU is getting two new regents next year.

The U-M women’s swimming and diving team, fresh off a Big Ten championship, are sending ten Wolverines to the NCAA championships.

Washtenaw County, at $89,180, had the fifth-highest median household income in Michigan, according to 2024 data. Neighboring Livingston was No. 1 with a median income of $103,039.

Should the city replace its twenty-two air sirens with “alternate emergency alert models” like TV and radio transmissions, texts or push notifications, and social media posts? Because, you know, nothing ever interferes with the Internet and everyone these days is just glued to their transistor radios. Weigh in here.

Fast-growing Scio Twp. has a new local news source.

Marketplace

Tiki meets speakeasy at Hunã: Dave Algase goes inside and downstairs at Echelon in this month’s Observer to find the 4,000-square-foot subterranean lounge decked out with scores of tiki idols, a thatched-roof bar, bamboo-trimmed hut, and walls of stone and primitive wood. Managing director and partner Emily Habib says that beyond the ambiance, the menu offers “some really cool modern twists on tiki culture.” The fare is also distinct from the high-end plates offered upstairs.

Indy bookstores proliferate post-Borders: The closure of the once-mighty bookstore chain’s flagship store in the heart of downtown Ann Arbor has provided opportunities for others to fill a wide range of literary niches, Concentrate reports. Dawn Treader owner Africa Schaumann says keeping a bookshop afloat is a challenge that “you don’t go into for the money. You go into it for the love of the game.”

Ann Arbor Running Co. flees downtown: The shoe store has abandoned its S. Ashley St. shop to focus on its locations at the Colonnade and Traver Village locations, according to a social media post. Owner Ian Forsyth told MLive rising rents and a lack of parking were factors in the decision.

Helpers

Courtesy: Davy Rothbart

Filmmaker Davy Rothbart launches GoFundMe for ICE detainee: The Emmy-winning Community High and U-M alum (left, above) writes that he felt “helpless, heartbroken, and furious” watching his friend, Mamady Camara, (right, above) be arrested by immigration enforcement during a routine check-in at the ICE office in Detroit in January. Camara, according to Rothbart’s crowdfunding page, came to the U.S. in 2023 at age seventeen seeking asylum from civil unrest in Guinea. Rothbart says Camara is a legal immigrant who works as a caregiver for Rothbart’s bedbound, elderly father. Rothbart’s target of $27,500 is the amount he believes Camara needs if a judge allows him to go home to Ypsi on bond.

U-M fundraiser in D.C. breaks record: The annual benefit breakfast in the nation’s capital, attended by both Michigan senators as well as four Wolverine State members of Congress, brought in $147,000 for the Samuel L. Chappell Family Scholarship, the University Record writes. Lisa McClain, a Republican congressmember from The Thumb, gave the keynote to a crowd of more than 350 alumni, students, faculty, and others.

Rotary Club launches spring food drive: The Ann Arbor chapter hopes to collect nonperishable food items and cash donations for Food Gatherers to cover the equivalent of 100,000 meals between March 9 and 20, according to a news release. Gifts of $25 or more will be matched up to $15,000 by Todd and Margaret Kephart; $25 pays for 100 meals. This site provides more information on how to give.

Show benefits Thurston, Clague parent-teacher groups: The Thurston Community Players perform Rollin’ on the Riverboat on Saturday at 6 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at Huron High. The show, which features students, parents, and friends, is the troupe’s fiftieth annual original musical comedy. For more information and to buy tickets, visit thurstonplayers.org.

Things To Do

By Jennifer Taylor

Friday: Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s bittersweet, chronologically reversed musical Merrily We Roll Along is at the Riverside Arts Center.

Saturday: The city trains volunteer scientists to help with an upcoming annual salamander survey.

Sunday: The “Shamrocks and Shenanigans 5K,” which benefits Save a Heart, starts and finishes at Conor O’Neill’s.

See the Observer’s online calendar for many more local events.