Village Life: Flint’s water story triggers writers’ unease
By Jan Worth-Nelson Scene One: I’m sitting under a yellow umbrella with Andrew Highsmith and my husband Ted in a sunny plaza at a California university. The yellow makes our faces look like we’ve smeared ourselves with dandelions. It’s a chilly but sunny 63. Highsmith has just gone back for seconds on his drink. “This diet black cherry soda is unbelievably good,” he says. I’m finishing my avocado and quinoa salad and Ted is leaning...
Village Life: Can water be made holy again?
By Jan Worth-Nelson In the bleached and bleak light the morning after the Rachel Maddow show, I wake up torpid and head-achey with depression. I know the signs. When I get so down, the molten lava flowing just under that lethargy usually comes down to one hot origin: fury. It’s a fury so intense my body, programmed from childhood toward cordiality, automatically tries to tamp it down, tries to modulate it, like a stopcock, like the...
Village Life: There’s no avoiding family life this season
Column by Jan Worth-Nelson The trouble with holidays, really, is families. The trouble with holidays is how society arm-wrestles us into facing who begat us. Sitting around various dining room tables, the menu rife with clichéd dishes and family histories – and so often histrionics – every year we play out, once again, what we’re like when we’re together. Who doesn’t dread it: the worn-out in-jokes, the one over-exuberant drunk, the...
Bicycle culture rolling around new spokes in Flint
By Andrew Keast and Jan Worth-Nelson If anybody provides evidence that Flint might be transforming itself – from the wheels up — into a bicycle-friendly culture, it’s Danny Moilanen, 28, owner of Vehicle City Tacos and a self-described “social cycler.” In 2012, he and a few of his friends created the Thursday Night Party Ride, an easygoing summertime tour through Flint. It starts at 9 p.m. and pauses every 15 minutes or so for...
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