Inside Detroit’s merciless graffiti crackdown
Three years in, Mayor Mike Duggan's war on graffiti has yielded more than 50 arrests and $1.2 million in fines
Detroit redefined: city hires America’s first official ‘chief storyteller’
Irritated by the relentless focus on ruin porn, or pre-emptive stories about the city’s tech resurgence, Aaron Foley will attempt to offer a more nuanced portrait {read}
New York City, Seen Through Its Bodegas
This summer, ten authors will explore their changing neighborhoods for The Bodega Project
Big holdup for borrowers claiming for-profit college fraud
Tens of thousands of former students who say they were swindled by for-profit colleges are being left in limbo as the Trump administration delays action on requests for loan forgiveness,…
How the Ilitches used ‘dereliction by design’ to get their new Detroit arena
Little Caesars Arena opens today, marking a new era for Detroit's Cass Corridor. But while the late Mike Ilitch and his family get a lot of credit for reviving the…
Abortion Access in Missouri Is Getting Easier, Thanks to Planned Parenthood and Satanists
The Satanic challenge to the laws began in 2015, when a pregnant Satanist from rural Missouri identified as “Mary” tried to use a religious waiver to exempt herself from the…
The Voynich Manuscript and Truth on the Internet
It can be a little frightening for medievalists to see self-evidently wrongheaded interpretations spread like wood lice.
Why Science-Fiction Writers Couldn’t Imagine the Internet
On Star Trek, humans talked to computers—they even used something like floppy disks and memory sticks—but nowhere did crew members get information from ethereal machines whose locations and identities were…
Fire Management May Date Back 40,000 Years
Researchers Simon Haberle of Australian National University, and fire ecologist David Bowman, in cooperation with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center, dated charcoal and pollen in the core sample, and determined that…
How the Vietnam War Broke the American Presidency
The war opened the credibility gap. What we’ve learned since has only widened it. LBJ: It’s damned easy to get in a war, but it’s going to be awfully hard…