Last week, 750 Detroiters turned out at the city's signature museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) to bear witness and raise cash for the 124-year-old institution, and honor philanthropist A. Alfred Taubman. It was a harmonious blending of blue bloods and blue collars coming together among the many treasures...

The television screen flashed that all-to-familiar headline of a death in the nation: a photo followed by a birth date and an exit date: In this case, a picture of Soupy Sales followed by the dates 1926-2009.

"Nooo! Soupy's dead!"

Detroiter Rodney McDonald, like many of us, grew up enjoying...

"Bama got the Peace Prize!"

It was my mother's voice on the other end of the phone, talking about the most important news of the new day. These were the first meaningful words of a conversation that usually concerns her every-other-day preparations for dialysis treatment. If...

Back home again, her three-and-one-half hours of dialysis over, my mother negotiates her way through a maze of bags, chairs and boxes, toward the hazy out-of-focus shapes of the kitchen. There, the sound of her brown dachshund's thumping tail beats out a rhythmic hello. Tied to the basement door day...

It really rubs me the wrong way that all the stories I see about the death of the automobile industry in Detroit always include pictures of the old Packard plant on the city's east side. While it is an image of urban decay, it has nothing to do with the...

It had been raining about an hour when the locksmith rang my doorbell. I went to the door prepared to put his mind at ease. If you didn't know, Detroit is like that. Nowadays delivery men, telephone installers, utility personnel, even the mail carriers are suspicious when entering a private...

For once there is some good news when I arrive in Detroit: the city is hosting the Final Four and Michigan State University has high hopes of going to the big dance. The city's teams win big (The Red Wings Stanley Cup winners) or lose big (the Lions 0 and...

Wednesday, my last day at the local YMCA before going to Detroit, was fairly normal for me. I arrived a little before 8:30 in the morning and greeted my buddy Payo. He gave me his blood sugar numbers for the day. I mumbled something about mine and tried to slip...

Coffee culture is changing the rules of engagement for some residents of Los Angeles, forging a subculture that promotes a sense of community among people who remain wedded to their automobiles. This is not to say that we have gotten out of the habit of one person per car as...

I made a new friend in January. Her name is Susan James and she's a writer based in Los Angeles. We met at a press luncheon at the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA), sponsored by the Berlin Tourist Board. This year marks the 20th anniversary of fall of the Berlin...

In January, Logan Byers, a 28-year old graduate student at the University of Arizona returned to Tucson from Guatemala where she had spent 6 weeks living with a local family and studying Spanish. It had been, over all, a positive experience, and she was looking forward to getting back to...

The news commentator moved his hands across a digitized map pointing to different countries, and like a magician pulling colorful scarves from a hat, made a photograph appear with local celebrants enjoying their Obama moment. It was as if spores from a sea of dandelions had taken flight from the...

Sunday morning, students gathered in the cafeteria of Manning High School while two rain-spattered Lancaster tour buses parked outside, waiting to ferry them to Washington D.C. Twenty-nine parents would go along as chaperones. The band's director, Ray Francis, scurried about making sure that all eighty-five band members were present...