I was one of more than a dozen FBI agents assigned to surveillance on Braeburn Cir. on Ann Arbor’s south side. After a few hours, another agent, Stan Lapekas, suggested we look in a Dumpster at the townhouse complex for...
Read MoreIn her State of the University address in October 2009, then-U-M president Mary Sue Coleman proposed doubling the university’s annual research spending by 2017, to $2 billion. “It would require a tremendous...
Read MoreAfter years of negotiations following decades of failed attempts, the four-county regional transit millage nearly didn’t make it to the November 8 ballot.Two weeks before the language was finalized, Oakland and Macomb...
Read MoreAfter just a week on the job, new city administrator Howard Lazarus terminated the city’s contract with ReCommunity, the company that’s processed recycling at the city’s Materials Recovery Facility for the last...
Read MoreFrom its earliest days Ann Arbor has been a reading town with enthusiastic library supporters. Its first library was launched in 1827, just three years after the city was founded. Even so, the history of our libraries is not a...
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After nearly a decade’s absence from the local political scene, two slates are on the November ballot, one for the school board and the other for the library board. Eight candidates are running for each nonpartisan body....
Read MoreAt my home there’s no car, Internet, TV, or stereo. I like to party like it’s 1899.And I like Ann Arbor. A walk through my neighborhood reveals the care with which residents tend their gardens. How they nod as you...
Read MoreAfter closing his store for the evening, Zana Zangana greets me with a firm handshake. He shows me to a seat in his office and deftly slices some vegetables and cheese onto a platter, and places two forks on it.Reporters...
Read MoreAn army of white-haired dandelions marches across the greens at Ann Arbor Country Club, like the ghosts of long-gone golfers. Last autumn’s fallen leaves blow against the clubhouse’s locked front door. The grass on...
Read MoreJim Harbaugh has elevated Michigan football expectations into someplace between the unlikely and the absurd. In mid-August, Las Vegas listed Michigan as a favorite (along with Alabama) to make it to the NCAA championship game....
Read More“I was looking out the window, and I saw a cloud of bats swooping and twirling through the air in the dusk over my neighbor’s trees,” Cathleen recalls. “I said, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of bats. Go...
Read More“I didn’t see when the deer first went down,” recalls Christine Stead. “It was dark in the morning. My husband and I could hear the noise–[coyotes] howl a lot when they’re in a pack and...
Read MoreShopping at Meijer recently, Mike Hood saw pallets stacked with bottled water–and began to cry. The bottles, he says, “represented so much trauma and pain I couldn’t even talk.”Until last fall, Hood,...
Read MoreThe August 2 city council primary is odd in more ways than one.Mayor Christopher Taylor and councilmembers Kirk Westphal and Julie Grand are heading to reelection unchallenged (see Inside Ann Arbor, p.13). In two other wards,...
Read MoreWashtenaw County’s Honor List of the men and women who died or disappeared during World War II includes names still familiar to our communities: Hafly, Heselschwerdt, Koch, Schaible, Schneider, Salter, Van Dyken, Vetter,...
Read MoreIn the past five years, three Ann Arborites were murdered. In that same time span, six pedestrians and bicyclists were killed by motor vehicles.That alone could explain why no one running for city council in August’s...
Read More“This year we have something very big that’s happening,” says Karen Delhey, executive director of the Guild of Artists and Artisans, sponsor of one of the four independent events that collectively make up the...
Read MoreA few years back, the Centers for Disease Control anounced approvingly that 145 million Americans walk for exercise. But a good hike should be more than racking up steps on a Fitbit or Apple Watch. An amble though our towns can...
Read MoreLike many other nineteenth-century immigrants, the first Jewish Ann Arborites came from southern Germany. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, “The five Weil brothers and their parents arrived in 1845; they conducted...
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