Deneau, who works regular twenty-four hour shifts, finds comfort in his woodchuck friends. “On a day where things aren’t going our way, our station mascots are still out there doing their thing—unbothered by circumstances outside of their control.”
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It was an experiment: give 100 citizens on the margins monthly cash payments of $528 for two years. No strings
attached—they would decide for themselves how best to spend the additional income.
Kobylarz, thirty-six, has loved rodents since childhood. Chipmunks ate from her hand at her family’s cabin up north in Gaylord. At home in Westland, her parents gave her gerbils as a gift. In college at Central Michigan she bought “feeder mice,” which pet stores sell as food for reptiles, to keep as pets
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Hats. Hats. And more hats!
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Litman brings a blend of humor and scholarship to her new book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes. Pop culture references that include Barbie, Game of Thrones, and Taylor Swift help illustrate her witty analytic history of key SCOTUS rulings.
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“I prefer to be struggling in Ann Arbor as an artist than wasting every waking hour on my planet putting money into someone else’s pocket,” says Kymm Clark, whose circuitous journey has brought her back to Tree Town to her new collaborative fabrication studio, LullCo.
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It’s a cold spring afternoon, but ecologist Sheila Schueller is determined to find signs of life in her backyard pond. She scoops a wiggling alien-looking creature into her net. “Ooh, you see how it has baby wings right there?” she asks. Come summer, she explains, this nymph with the bulging eyes will emerge as a dragonfly and “eat up” any mosquitoes.
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“I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I liked books,” Gene Alloway says, seated at his desk in the middle of a shop full of them on a rainy afternoon.
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After dusk on a cold, starry night, guests can easily follow the enticing aromas of a wood fire and a sweet treat across patches of snow to Elsi and Bob Sly’s sugar shanty. Open the door, and a fog of evaporating sap and an array of hot dogs, baked beans, and salads promise a one-of-a-kind winter picnic.
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A Community High and U-M grad, Rothbart has worked as a ticket scalper and pizza delivery driver, created a magazine, and won an Emmy. This year, a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship brought his family—wife Margaret Box and their kids, Desi, six, and Birdie, three—to a rented house on the Old West Side. And this month, he’s reuniting with his second family—the one featured in his documentary 17 Blocks—in an event at the Michigan Theater.
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On Sunday nights, Conor O’Neill’s Irish Pub reverberates with the sounds of guitars, flutes, fiddles, bodhráns, harps, accordions, harmonicas, whistles, bouzoukis, and uilleann pipes. Often, the toe-tapping, soul-searching tunes are led by Marty Somberg on the Irish fiddle.
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Since establishing her Ann Arbor studio in 2016, the U-M art grad has won nineteen international design awards for the ingeniously styled furniture she builds at Maker Works, the nonprofit south-side workshop. Often custom made for her interior design clients—she also has an interior design degree from EMU—they include colorful wall-art Squiggles made from PVC, acrylic, and wood, and Bolts, wooden cocktail tables threaded on marble bases. “The furniture work has a monolithic nature that is somewhat serious and whimsical at the same time,” she says.
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On October 7, 2023, as Jon Mallek married first-term state representative Jason Morgan in matching navy suits with teal bowties under a trellis draped with eucalyptus leaves, the thought of running for office himself was the furthest thing from his mind.
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Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1930, the retired U-M professor remembers a wonderful childhood—until 1937, when the Nazis confiscated her father’s bank and gave it to “non-Jews.” Ever resourceful, her father managed to find a job with American Express and moved the family to Amsterdam. “But we had not moved far enough,” Butter says. The Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and instituted the same anti-Semitic policies the Hasenbergs had fled three years earlier.
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Recently, a book appeared among the Nepali handicrafts in the window of Himalayan Bazaar on Main St. Beyond Everest traces the path that took the store’s co-owner from grinding poverty to the top of the world’s highest mountain. He and his wife and co-owner, Moni Mulepati, were married there, drawing international coverage.
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Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw opened Zingerman’s Delicatessen in 1982. It became the cornerstone of a Community of Businesses that today has a staff of 700 and annual sales of more than $80,000,000. Along the way, Weinzweig has published more than two dozen books on food, business, and leadership. This article is excerpted from his latest, a hand-bound chapbook that connects his early life to his work today.
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Born Mary Margaret Lauth, she’s “always been called Moni.” At ninety-nine she still cooks her own breakfast and lunch, keeps up with numerous family members and acquaintances, writes letters, discusses politics and social trends, and reads voraciously. The books stacked on the coffee table in her All Seasons apartment are topped by Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom and Barbara McQuade’s Attack from Within.
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In many ways, Jace Mendoza is a typical twelve-year-old. He likes to play video games with friends, watch YouTube videos, and eat pizza. But one thing sets Jace apart from his peers: He’s training to become a world-champion speed skater.
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Yuan Xiao has earned a reputation for turning out top competitors. “He has unbelievable respect in the gymnastics world,” says Justin Spring, an NBC gymnastics commentator and Olympic bronze medalist who now coaches at the University of Alabama.
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Whether he plays at Blue LLama, the Kerrytown Concert House, or does a solo gig at the Earle, Rick Roe usually includes a few of Monk’s tunes and some of his own. These show Monk’s influence, but Roe has studied many other great musicians—“Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, and not only piano players”—as well. His music integrates their influence and is entirely his own.
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