At 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 MoreLos Angeles occupies a singular place in jazz history. Though many accomplished musicians have moved there, beginning with prominent New Orleans jazz pioneers early in the twentieth century, in many ways it has remained...
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“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 MoreViewed from the outside this summer, you’d hardly guess that Saline’s Two Twelve Arts Center was about to close its doors forever. Events like the colorful “Knit 1 Bike 2 Saline” scavenger hunt had...
Read More“I’m your black-Jewish-Irish-Catholic-Jehovah’s Witness dean!” a smiling Aaron Dworkin told an audience of incoming freshmen at the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance. The kids laughed and...
Read MoreQ. I’ve been noticing an increasing number of temporary signs advertising things like “LIQUOR at state minimum” along local streets. I tried to learn what the city’s ordinances about this are but got...
Read MoreA life-size Star Wars storm trooper stood guard against a backdrop of the desert planet Tatooine, as three-year-old twins Stella and Zoe battled using the plastic light sabers they’d snatched from a nearby prop box. The...
Read MoreOur curiosity was piqued when we walked the Pine-Aspen Loop off the Sam Graham Trees Trail at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens. One option on the loop is an informal path through a stand of white pine trees configured in a...
Read MoreFour spray-painted words cover a “HomeGoods Coming Soon” sign: “We Want Value World.” The small red-and-white sign deplored, but surely will not stop, the many changes taking place at the Maple Village...
Read MoreRoger Monk’s, the restaurant and bar on Plymouth Rd. in Dixboro, closed unannounced over the first weekend of August. “We were all there Saturday night, and Sunday morning the signs were up,” says MoonWinks...
Read MoreWith their grand new 3bird, Cathy Swan, Laura Telesco, and Laura Keefer have invigorated retail on Main St. Their new store is still on Main St., but they moved it over a block, consolidating Nichols & Stafford and the Home...
Read MoreEver appreciated the particularly pristine stretch of Huron River Dr. between Weber and Foster roads? Thank John Wilkins, who lives on Newport and for twenty-one years has been walking the nearly 1.5-mile route, picking up every...
Read MoreDocumentary filmmaker Jeffrey Wengrofsky had always wanted to visit Detroit. Like his hometown, New York City, he envisioned Detroit as having a creative spirit forged out of the economic hardships of the 1970s. “Detroit...
Read MoreMexican returns to the Clocktower Commons.Clocktower Commons lost its Mexican restaurant in 2013, when Pancho Villa (ne Las Fuentes) closed. Now it has one again. In early August, Los Tres Amigos was bustling with workers...
Read MoreThe $385,000 home off Dhu Varren on the city’s north side was the forty-sixth built by AASBIP students since the program started in 1970. It fills out a street named for the late Earl Shaffer, who ran career and technical...
Read MoreAt 3 p.m. on a July Wednesday, Matteo Melosi had already closed his Westside Barbecue. “After eleven o’clock the crowds show up, and when all the product is gone, that’s when we close our doors,” he said,...
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