“Andalucia, when can we see you?” The answer is in September 2023 One of my favorite songs of all time is John Cale’s “Andalucia.” Cale, who will turn 80 this coming March, is a classically-trained, avant-garde musician who went on to play bass, viola, guitar, piano, and organ in the anything-but-classical Velvet Underground. When the […]

Great Zingerman’s gift for a T-shirt lover you love! Given that he was born and raised in Japan and I grew up in the American Midwest, author Haruki Murakami and I seem to have a surprising number of things in common. As I wrote about last summer, we each run every day, write a lot, and […]

Dark chocolate artisan “nuggets” ready to mix with milk If you’re looking for a great-tasting drink to bring comfort as the colder weather works its way into our lives this fall, check out this superb new Sipping Chocolate from my friend Shawn Askinosie. Everything we’ve gotten from Shawn for the last fifteen years has been […]

An early chance to buy a whole bunch of great Christmas gifts In 1838, the year after the barn at Cornman Farms was built, Filippo Barbero had begun working as a baker at the church of Mombercelli, about fifteen miles south of the small city of Asti in northern Italy. Forty-five years later, Filippo’s son […]

Creating a culture where people act like they care and care enough to act Roya Hakakian was born back in 1966, into a Jewish family in Iran. Hakakian was 13 in 1979 when the ultra-orthodox Moslem regime took power and many previously well-accepted freedoms were taken away. She remembers women, suddenly unable to dress as […]

A very tasty treasure in Ann Arbor’s culinary ecosystem One thing I’ve learned from traveling a lot over the years is that often, myself included, we can take local treasures for granted while we’re simultaneously letting ourselves be wowed by what we “discover” when we leave town. When I consider the context of the national […]