After a 12-year tour of duty in Michigan, my stalwart purple Plymouth Voyager finally succumbed to the road salt and crumbled into what looked like Martian dust. I was about to sign for a solid little Ford sedan with all the sex appeal of pleated khakis when I caught a bright flash of presidential blue out of the corner of my eye. Sitting on the lot like a shiny secondhand Captain America, the car of my dreams — all right, the car of the dreams I could afford — was suddenly a 2009 Jeep Patriot.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say. Fashion may be one of the most subjective forms of personal expression, a series of choices that function like turn signals, letting those around us know our mood, our point of view, how we want the world to see us. Date night is a particularly peril-fraught endeavor — piles of clothes on the bed, hundreds of outfits rejected. Is this the right vibe for the bar, the bowling alley, a pizza place? Will she think I’m cool in this? Will he think I’m h

“Yeah,” says Freya Gothelf, sounding every bit the 71 inches of teenager, “if you grow up to be 5-foot 11-inches and you’re a 14-year-old, you think about [modeling]. People tell you, ‘Oh, hey, you should be a model.’” Now a four-year veteran of runways and fashion shoots, she’s pushing 20, about which she says, with sort of mock horror, “I don’t want to hear that. In modeling, that’s horrible.” Gothelf is very clear that modeling is for kids. Her earliest modeling memories have more to do wit

Greg Martin was serving as a church youth director when he got a calling of a slightly different kind. In May of 2012, the day after one of many tornadoes pummeled Alabama that year, Martin says “I had this overwhelming sense that I should go do something.” Martin, from Clarkston, texted 100 friends, inviting them to travel to Alabama with him to help. A dozen friends answered the call, Disaster Rel

Britney Spears may want to take notes: How does one appear onstage in a skin-tight red sequined sheath and 16-inch platform pumps singing “Santa, please take me off of your naughty list” to four twenty-something bumping and grinding Santa-suited dancer studs, and still make it look like family entertainment? Apparently, you must be Marie Osmond. Though, arguably, anybody with he

The Journey from Worst to First: 5 CX lessons we learned from the Domino’s turnaround The secret it turns out, is in the sauce. And the dough. And the cheese. But it’s also in the corporate culture, the marketing, the store layout, and the technology. On March 6, at HAP’s first CX Connect event, HAP’s C.A.R.E. Connectors got to taste the results of their improvement efforts with a sampling of Domino’s pizzas. And we got to hear how Domino’s achieved them from Tim McIntyre, Domino’s executive vice president of Communication, Investor Relations and Legislative Affairs.

In a campaign to reanimate Woodward Avenue as a thriving retail destination, the Somerset Collection last year teamed with Bedrock Real Estate and Quicken Loans to light up Woodward’s 1200 block. When the lights went on, the group realized that the empty windows along the avenue offered a golden opportunity to bring back the old feeling of strolling down Woodward Avenue at holiday time. This year, volunteers from Bedrock and Quicken cleaned and prepared the windows, expanding into spaces in the