-
3 weeks ago | 
northernexpress.com | Stephen Tuttle |Ross Boissoneau |Anna Faller |Ellen Miller
Spectator By Stephen Tuttle | June 7, 2025 A word first coined by a Polish author in 1944, “genocide” is defined by Amnesty International as the killing or destruction of specific ethnic, racial, national, or religious groups or nationalities with the intent of fully destroying them.
Sadly, these kinds of horrors have existed pretty much forever. History lists hundreds of genocides all over the globe.
-
4 weeks ago | 
northernexpress.com | Stephen Tuttle |Abby McKiernan |Quinn De Vecchi |Jillian Manning
Spectator By Stephen Tuttle | May 31, 2025 I think that I shall never seeA poem lovely as a tree.
So begins Joyce Kilmer’s classic ode to our leafy friends. He’d likely be displeased if he was still alive and lived around here these days; we’ve found plenty of reasons to remove plenty of trees from plenty of locations.
This lament should be prefaced with the acknowledgment that people are not marauding with chainsaw in hand, felling trees at random for no reason.
-
1 month ago | 
northernexpress.com | Stephen Tuttle |Drew VanDrie |Anna Faller |Kierstin Gunsberg
Spectator By Stephen Tuttle | May 24, 2025 Be thankful your children don’t attend public schools in Oklahoma. Superintendent Ryan Walters has interesting ideas on what schools should be teaching and how they should teach it.
-
1 month ago | 
northernexpress.com | Stephen Tuttle |Matt Dursum |Abby McKiernan |Ross Boissoneau
Spectator By Stephen Tuttle | May 10, 2025 First, we have to tear things down, demonizing both people and institutions.
Human enemies are easy enough to define—we’ll call people here illegally rapists, murderers, released prisoners, and mental patients. We’ll describe Muslims, and most anybody from a Muslim-dominant country, as terrorists.
That way, people who look a little different, speak a different language, or believe a different religion become easy targets.
-
1 month ago | 
northernexpress.com | Stephen Tuttle |Craig Manning |Ross Boissoneau |Karl Klockars
Spectator By Stephen Tuttle | May 3, 2025 As always, there is plenty of activity in Traverse City. Issues pop up like trilliums this time of year. Some are old and reliably and perpetually unsolved, like affordable housing or what to do with the homeless population, and some show up uninvited, like how to make up for cuts in federal funding to programs.
Let’s take a look at three current issues that were neither surprises nor crisis-level impossible.
-
2 months ago | 
northernexpress.com | Stephen Tuttle |Abby McKiernan |Matt Dursum |Art Bukowski
Spectator By Stephen Tuttle | April 26, 2025 There is not a section, paragraph, sentence, or word in the United States Constitution that says the Legislative and Judicial branches of the government are subservient to the Executive branch. Not one. The Founders conceived of three equal branches of government checking and balancing each other.
-
2 months ago | 
northernexpress.com | Stephen Tuttle |Art Bukowski |Molly Cox |Ren Brabenec
Spectator By Stephen Tuttle | April 12, 2025 The Hands Off! protests of a couple weeks ago were impressive in their size and scope. According to various media reports, gatherings took place in some 1,400 American communities with nearly 600,000 people signing up in advance (per CNN), and even more participating.
Locally in Traverse City, 4,000 people reportedly showed up to express their displeasure with a variety of issues.
-
Mar 22, 2025 | 
northernexpress.com | Stephen Tuttle |Todd VanSickle |Abby McKiernan |Art Bukowski
Spectator By Stephen Tuttle | March 22, 2025 In an essay in The Wall Street Journal, he said he wants to “... drive a dagger through the heart of climate change religion and usher in America’s Golden Age...”
Of course, that was a CEO of a fossil fuel or petrochemical conglomerate, right? No, that was Lee Zeldin, the new Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and he made those comments after he accepted the position.
-
Mar 8, 2025 | 
northernexpress.com | Stephen Tuttle |Anna Faller |Rachel Pasche |Art Bukowski
Spectator By Stephen Tuttle | March 8, 2025 The United States has been a beacon of hope for much of the world for eight decades. It took Donald Trump a month to turn off that light.
This becomes obvious as we betray Ukraine, turn our backs on our NATO allies, and inflict punitive tariffs on our best trading partners. The intentionally public Oval Office ambush of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should have told our skeptical friends all they needed to know.
-
Feb 22, 2025 | 
northernexpress.com | Stephen Tuttle |Victor Skinner |Anna Faller |Molly Cox
Spectator By Stephen Tuttle | Feb. 22, 2025 College athletics has become fully professionalized. Amateurism and education are no longer front and center; pay-to-play is the new order of the day.
Many would argue this is only fair. College athletics is not some minor-league enterprise, it’s a full-blown industry with full-blown industrial-size money.
