Since April, Briarwood Mall has welcomed a spate of new stores, including four national retailers: Lush, the U.K.-based cosmetics company known for its handmade all-natural products; Michael Kors, featuring the designer’s...
Read MoreThere might be something rural or at least Midwestern in my reaction to memoirs. I enjoy reading them, but unless they are leavened by a self-deprecating wit I get bored very quickly. If the authors can’t laugh at...
Read MoreKnowing an artist’s biography is not essential to enjoying his or her work. Nor is it necessary to be familiar with the history of a work of art to appreciate it. It’s not our knowledge of Schubert’s tragic...
Read MoreHigh school rock bands aren’t generally known for their clarity of musical vision and certainly not for having a lasting legacy. But the members of Ann Arbor’s Sproton Layer mustered the former while they were still...
Read MoreLast fall, when a manager at the now-defunct L.A. Pub inside the Ann Arbor Country Club asked new prep cook Aaron Peggs what he’d do if the failing restaurant were his, Peggs didn’t mince words. “I told him...
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In an Internet where conversation means cheap jokes, trashy entertainment, and serial rants, what in the web is hubski.com?”It’s a safe place on the Internet to have thoughtful conversations with civil people,”...
Read MoreThe Godfrey Building, a former warehouse anchoring the southwest corner of Kerrytown Market & Shops, is now used for upscale shops and offices. Built in 1899, it still retains its basic structure–wide plank floors,...
Read MoreWhen Binod Dhakal, owner of Cardamom Indian restaurant, glanced out the window at the long line of people waiting to get a table during his opening weekend, “I was just so happy to see the response,” he says. Dhakal,...
Read MoreFor the third season at Mark’s Carts on Washington, there’s a new taco trailer and a mini-satellite cart from an established BBQ restaurant. Mark Hodesh has engineered still more gastronomic public service for folks...
Read MorePlymouth Road Plaza, a small, two-story mini-mall, recently opened in what used to be the front parking lot of the Plymouth Road Mall. Embedded in its architecture are some small clues about contemporary fashions in urban...
Read MoreNoodles & Company will open its third Ann Arbor location in the former KFC location on W. Stadium Blvd. in mid-July. The company previously had considered building nearby on the site of the former Sze-Chuan West restaurant....
Read More“I’ve had a lot of adventures in my life, but I could have done without this one,” says Tom Fournier, eighty-seven. As he cleaned up his kitchen one night last month, he noticed light flickering outside his...
Read MoreAs an undergrad at the U-M at the turn of the century, Bair put together his own degree program in urban planning, then earned an organic farming certificate at Michigan State. “I thought I was going to start my own...
Read MoreThe guys at the 2013 reunion of the 3/27 Marines were lucky enough to make it home from Vietnam, and maybe even luckier to make it to Weber’s Inn all these years later. But maybe none is luckier than Melvin Cox. “I...
Read MoreSanjay Panjwani likes to jump on coffee tables and throw chairs. And he asks customers at his new All About Furniture store, which took over the foreclosed House of Sofas space on Jackson Road (“we have no connection to...
Read MoreWith the No Thai! empire going strong–three locations at last count–Eric Joh, a friend of the founders, kicked around an idea: How about a restaurant inspired by the banh mi sandwich craze? And that’s how Belly...
Read MoreAlarmed by the school district’s deepening financial hole, the twenty-two-year-old Ann Arbor Public Schools Foundation recently hired its first full-time director, Mary Cooperwasser. “It is time for all of us to...
Read MoreWe received only ninety-four entries correctly identifying last month’s Fake Ad for Schoolboys Records and the Downers’ new album, Everything Sucks. That paltry total may have been caused by the ad’s placement,...
Read More“That’s the RoosRoast Coffee Lobster Butter Love truck!!” exclaims Diane McIntyre. “I love their coffee … too bad they’re not an advertiser in case I would win!!!” “While I’m...
Read MoreGus Ashkar says he thinks the smoking ban in Michigan restaurants and bars makes perfect sense. “It’s a good law,” he says, sitting behind the counter of his recently opened Puff Puff Smoke Shop in the Oaks...
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