Dec 31
2008
What's Going on in Detroit?
A really solid (and long) profile of Detroit from the Weekly Standard. The city's numbers are astounding: 10k unsolved murders since 1960, no new textbooks for schools in 19 years, 24.9 percent graduation rate, 60k vacant dwellings and, of course, an 0 and 16 football team. It goes beyond the numbers, though, also doing a bit of a profile on journalist Charlie LeDuff who sounds like quite an interesting fellow (I've got the Slaughterhouse piece he won a Pullitzer for waiting to be read).
Part of what struck me in reading this was thinking about how much it sounded like the Baltimore depicted in the Wire (of which I'm now on Season 5).
Tags: detroit
10 years ago I was doing work for O'gara Hess & Eisenhardt...an armory company in Cincinnati. Part of their business involved advising overseas travelers on threat-levels and chances of violence and stuff like that when they traveled abroad. I asked my client what was the most dangerous place to travel in the world. He listed the usual Middle Eastern countries, a couple in Africa, I think Mexico City...but then above and beyond any of that was the east side of Detroit. Nice.