Maayan Silver

Crime and punishment. It’s not just a Dostoevsky novel, it’s also a very real issue that unfolds in courts around Wisconsin.  

When a defendant is convicted of a crime, he or she goes in front of a judge to be sentenced. But the story doesn’t begin and end there. Beyond the judges, there are many actors affecting what happens to that defendant before, during and after sentencing, from legislators and electors to parole boards and corrections departments.

"I like 'em brown, yellow, Puerto Rican or Haitian/Name is Phife Dawg from the Zulu Nation," rhymes the late MC Malik Izaak Taylor, aka 'Phife Dawg,' of the hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest on the track Electric Relaxation. 

Warning: This video contains uncensored language.

From the outside, it appears as though not much is going at the Milwaukee Mall. But inside, local entrepreneurs are running businesses, and running them without a lot of outside support. Located on the triangular intersection of Fond du Lac and North Avenue, the building was originally a Sears, Roebuck & Company store, built in 1927. Local newspapers at the time reported that it brought hundreds of jobs into the area.

Poet Jodie Hollander's aim is to make words sing, no matter where in the world she is writing them. 

Hollander was born and raised in Milwaukee. But for the past two decades, she has been traveling the world developing her craft.

Nestled between Miller Brewery and Harley Davidson on the west and Marquette University on the east, Milwaukee's near west side neighborhood is dotted with mansions and other historic spots from the 1800s and 1900s.

There's the Pabst Mansion, completed in 1892 to house the family of Milwaukee's famed beer barons; the Ambassador Hotel, an art deco retreat built in the 1920s and the Irish Cultural Center, which is housed in what was originally the Grand Avenue Congregational Church built in 1887. 

Watching the documentary Motley's Law, you might think that Attorney Kim Motley is some sort of super hero.

The Milwaukee-born former public defender went to Afghanistan on a "Rule of Law" program in 2008 set up by the federal government in order to train and mentor Afghan defense attorneys. In 2009, she left the program and set up a law practice in Kabul, becoming the first and only foreigner licensed to practice law there.

Sitting down to a good meal is an experience valued across cultures. A new food memoir by Native American artist and social sciences professor Thomas Pecore Weso, called Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir, expands upon this shared appreciation of food to open up a window into tribal life.

The memoir combines essays with accompanying recipes from Weso's childhood growing up in the 1950s and 60s on a northern Wisconsin Menominee reservation.

The Milwaukee Show is an integral part of the Milwaukee Film Festival. It’s a program that includes short films made by local filmmakers, and it is very popular with festival audiences.

It's hard being from the city and trying to figure out rural life. It's even harder when you've just gotten out of prison.

This year's Shorter is Better, the shorts-film-specific programming in the Milwaukee Film Festival, features a cast of unusual characters. It includes a little boy imagining his mother's new boyfriend is a crow, a used furniture salesman moonlighting as an administrator of euthanasia, and the true story of a holocaust survivor giving away the violin he had since WWII.

If you watch chef Alamelu Vairavan on her PBS show Healthful Indian Flavors, or read from one of her three cookbooks, you may think that she was born with the ability to quickly chop vegetables and sauté with ease. 

Make way for Milwaukee's Black Cat Alley.

During the first three weeks of September, muralists will turn an east side alley into a permanent outdoor arts destination.  

If you frequent a coffee shop, you probably recognize some familiar faces: people you notice every day who stop in for their coffee and who chat with other patrons and the staff.  You know, the regulars.

For Lake Effect's coffee series, we wanted to know why these people become regulars at a coffee shop and what this says about the role of coffee shops in our lives.

Lake Effect's been celebrating coffee month with a series of interviews and features on the beverage and the shops where we enjoy drinking it. Valentine Coffee Roasters in Washington Heights prides itself on having a one-stop shop for roasting and creating a cup of coffee.

Owners Robb Kashevarof and Joe Gilsdorf started Valentine Coffee Roasters in search of a balanced cup that was "not so darkly roasted that it's oily and bitter and burned, and not so lightly roasted that it's grassy and unfinished."

It's hard to imagine our society without coffee shops. Whether we go there for a quick latte, plug in a laptop or settle in with a conversation with a friend, for many people going to a specific location has come to be an integral part of drinking coffee and socializing.

Yet not many people think about how coffee shops came to play this role. After all in Good Will Hunting, Will infamously said, "Maybe we could get together and just eat a bunch of caramels...when you think about it, it's just as arbitrary as drinking coffee."