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On this June morning, with the heat and humidity rising, residents emerge from their homes one by one: mostly women, mostly older, mostly taking care of their mothers and grandkids. They’ve been calling the city, they say, for years without response and feel as abandoned as the houses that surround them—the foreclosed, devitalized structures that […]

Alex Haley sat at a desk typing notes while Malcolm—tall, austere, dressed always in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a narrow dark tie—drank cup after cup of coffee, paced the room, and talked. What emerged was the hegira of Malcolm’s life as a black man in mid-century America: his transformation from Malcolm Little, […]

“Red Dawn 2,” the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. A long-abandoned modernist skyscraper coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. For weeks, Chinese propaganda posters fluttered in the […]

The Washington Generals always lose: to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. They lose on indoor basketball courts and outdoor courts. They lose on ships, they lose on aircraft carriers, they lose in prisons and they lose on the back of trucks. … This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can […]

In his small office deep inside GM’s Vehicle Engineering Center in suburban Detroit, Posawatz pulls out some books on the history of electric vehicles, which date back to 1881 and outsold gasoline-powered cars in the early days. Henry Ford’s wife drove one. Posawatz points to a 1910 ad for the Baker Electric. Beneath a drawing […]

From Detroit: A nighttime raid. A reality TV crew. A sleeping seven-year-old. What one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America’s middle class.

The greatest rapper on earth gets personal on Proof, guns, Bill O’Reilly and being an artist from Detroit

The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of economics. It’s a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats, bad taste and busybodies. P.J. O’Rourke on why Americans fell out of love with the automobile.

Onetime Detroit Lions quarterback Jeff Komlo was a success in sports, business and love. So why did he die alone, on the run, thousands of miles from home?

When we talk about what the end of the U.S. auto industry will mean to thousands of autoworkers, we tend to have a specific image of that worker in mind: He’s a conservative white Democrat who lives in suburban Detroit, hangs out in his local union hall, belongs to a bowling league and owns a […]