I'm glad to see this interview was paired with the one on "Ruin Porn", because based on Okrent's story in Time, he's doing the prose version of Ruin Porn. History porn, perhaps?

I do hope the time he spends in his home city makes him able to write beyond the tired clichés and selective history that's been popularized over the years. I also hope it allows him to reach beyond tired metaphors of "bombed-out" houses and "soaring" murder rates. Soaring? Really? Based on what data? While the murder rate in Detroit is appalling, it has been basically constant for the past 10 years and even dropped significantly in 2008.

Good luck to Time and the rest. The real rubble they'll have to sift through in Detroit is not due to the crumbling buildings, but instead the rubble of a thousand previous news stories written from an outsider's perspective.

In the nineties, I worked for a PAO office in a small Army community in Germany. A Stars and Stripes reporter had an office next to mine and we talked quite a bit. Their paper rented a house in Sarajevo for its reporters and photographers who were covering the city after the war there. I find it interesting that Time is treating Detroit the same as that former war zone.

In the usual expansiveness of OtM, this report by y'all is now also referenced in my 9/26/09 10:34 comment to the 9/25 post as via http://community.detnews.com/blogs/index.php/neighborhood?blog=14&title=time_s_take_on_detroit&page=1&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1&disp=single which lauds that "Detroit ... a Great City" TIME story.