What Killed Detroit?

Charlie LeDuff is the best writer in Detroit and on Detroit and maybe the best newspaper writer in the country. If you haven't read his big Mother Jones piece ("What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?") from a couple months ago, check it when you can :

No one cared much about Detroit or its industrial suburbs until the Dow collapsed, the chief executives of the Big Three went to Washington to grovel, and General Motors declared bankruptcy—100 years after its founding. Suddenly, Detroit was historic, symbolic—hip, even. I began to get calls from reporters around the world wondering what Detroit was like, what was happening here. They were wondering if the Rust Belt cancer had metastasized and was creeping to Los Angeles and London and Barcelona. Was Detroit an outlier or an epicenter?