The truth was loose: I was the son of a son of a bitch, an ancestral prodigy born to clobber my way through loathsome dungheaps of idiot labor. My genes were cocked and loaded. I...

Flint, Michigan. Detroit as seen backwards through a telescope. The callus on the palm of the state shaped like a welder’s mitt. A town where 66.5 percent of the working citizenship are in some way,...