“Miraculously, Tomeka Langford is willing to talk to me.”
Detroit
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Culture, Essays & Criticism, Feature, profile, Story, Writing
Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes: On Novelist Nettie Jones and the Madness of ‘Fish Tales’
Edited by Toni Morrison, the 1983 novel ‘Fish Tales’ by Nettie Jones was supposed to set the literary world on fire. It didn’t.
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Story
The Enduring Myth of a Lost Live Iggy and the Stooges Album
In 1973, Columbia Records professionally recorded the infamous band for a planned concert record. Columbia never released it. Maybe they never recorded it.
Posted inArts & Culture, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Accidental Music History: How Jeff Gold Saved Rare Iggy & the Stooges Recordings from the Dump
Sometimes this is how musical history gets saved.
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘I Inherited Luck’: Bridgett M. Davis on Her Family’s Life in the Numbers
In a new memoir, novelist Bridgett M. Davis reveals that her mother was a Numbers operator in Detroit from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock
In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Quotes
Can Detroit’s Legendary Techno Scene Survive Gentrification?
On the growing tension between techno’s gritty origins and its current velvet-rope tendencies.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The New Old Sound of Motor City
How Detroit techno was born — and continued to thrive — amid financial and social strife.
Posted inArts & Culture, Reading List
More Than a Riot Going On: A ‘Detroit’-Inspired Reading List
The failures of Kathryn Bigelow’s film undercut the fullness, complexity, and beauty of Detroit.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
In the 1970s, It Was The Police That Made Made Detroit’s Streets Deadly
A special police unit terrorized the innocent and murdered the unarmed in the years after Detroit’s race riots.