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Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., walks up the House steps of the Capitol for the final votes before the Memorial Day recess on Thursday, May 23, 2019.

Dustin Dwyer

Dustin Dwyer is a reporter for a new project at Michigan Radio that will look at improving economic opportunities for low-income children. Previously, he worked as an online journalist for Changing Gears, as a freelance reporter and as Michigan Radio's West Michigan Reporter. Before he joined Michigan Radio, Dustin interned at NPR's Talk of the Nation, wrote freelance stories for The Jackson Citizen-Patriot and completed a Reporting & Writing Fellowship at the Poynter Institute.

Dustin earned his bachelor's degree from the University of South Florida. He's also lived in Colorado, California, Oregon and Washington D.C. He's always happy to explain - with detached journalistic objectivity - why Michigan is a better place to live than any of the others. 

  • When a disagreement on a Michigan street turned into a deadly gunbattle, with small children caught in the open, Carmesha Rogers ran into the line of fire, telling herself: "Just get the kids out the way. 'Cause I'd want someone to do that for my kids."
  • Economic historian Gregory Clark's study of social mobility traced surnames and found that a person's success in life may be largely determined by the status of ancestors hundreds of years ago. That means improving opportunities across generations might be a lot harder than anyone imagined.
  • Here, some takeaways from new research that finds that families rise and fall across generations at a much slower rate than anyone thought. For example, the research finds that French-Canadian immigrants are a disadvantaged minority in the U.S.
  • After being hyped as a homegrown remedy to America's dependence on foreign oil, the federally supported corn-based fuel ended up under attack as an environmental and economic failure. Now the smoke has cleared, and U.S. ethanol producers are booming.