Jack Lessenberry

If you talk to someone in Governor Snyder’s administration, you might get the impression that Michigan’s workforce had a lot to celebrate on Labor Day. Last month, unemployment fell to an astounding 3.7%. Frankly, I never thought during the Great Recession that I would ever live to see our state’s jobless rate fall below four percent again.

Earlier this week, I was asked to speak to all the incoming students at Wayne State University. Among many other things, I told them truthfully that I thought they were very lucky to be going to college in Detroit, which has become one of the most fascinating cities in the world. “Think about it,” I told them. “Do you ever see Philadelphia in the news?” Detroit’s comeback is a major national story.

We got the latest results from our statewide education tests earlier this week, and here are the highlights — without the jargon. Johnny mostly can’t read as well as he should, and neither can Susie, although she’s doing a little better. Both are doing a little better in math than last year, but not nearly as well as they should.

What do you do when the group you’ve belonged to your entire life no longer represents your values? This has often been a problem in the melting pot that is America. Children upset parents by rejecting traditional customs, like arranged marriage. But it is also a problem in politics.

As people in Texas and Louisiana struggle to deal with the impact of Harvey , the storm is also generating new conversations about how to deal with flooding in other parts of the country. Mid-Michigan is still recovering from floods in late June , and many Michigan cities have had problems in recent years.

More than two years ago, in one of state politics’ more sordid recent episodes, State Senator Virgil Smith Jr . was arrested after he shot up his ex-wife’s Mercedes. According to prosecutors, the Detroit Democrat was “alcohol dependent” at the time, had asked his former wife to come over for an intimate encounter and then physically assaulted her before shooting up her car. It is unclear whether he was trying to shoot her too.

There’s an old saying that if you put a frog in a pot of water and gradually increase the temperature one degree at a time, the frog won’t notice or hop out before it is cooked. Scientists say this isn’t really true for frogs, but it may well be true, at least intellectually, for people. Certainly, we can become desensitized to about any form of outrageousness. Consider what we are living through now. We have a President of the United States who says things almost every day that would have been

I had lunch yesterday with Mark Bernstein, the University of Michigan trustee who flirted with a run for governor next year before deciding not to. He is smart, funny, and I think genuinely committed to making the university and this state a better place. We were talking about what’s wrong with state government when he said something that suddenly hit me like a revelation. We were talking about how attitudes have changed, and he said, “I think a big part of it is that instead of seeing ourselves

There was a story two days ago that was almost entirely ignored in America, but which has significant implications for this part of the world. Dave Battagello of the Windsor Star reported that the new Gordie Howe International Bridge will be delayed another full year.

Robyn Vincent is a journalist from Detroit who moved to Wyoming some years ago, where she is the editor of Planet Jackson Hole , which she has built into one of the nation’s more interesting and journalistically vibrant alternative newspapers. I was honored to learn a few months ago that she follows and admires my work. She wondered, however, why I don’t tweet. She told me that if I did, I could have a considerably greater following than I do now.