The skies will begin to thicken and swarm next year, when the Federal Aviation Administration opens up U.S. airspace to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. Initially developed and used by the military, drones are now being made...
Read MoreIn a felicitous partnership of intellect and resources, the U-M Museum of Art is letting eminent U-M faculty members curate exhibitions of artworks drawn from UMMA’s vast collection. But there’s a catch: each faculty...
Read MoreMalcolm Gladwell has built an enormous career explaining the obvious in interesting and accessible ways. That is not a criticism. For instance, his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants,...
Read MoreSaxophonist Colin Stetson was raised in Ann Arbor and trained at the U-M. Although his university studies and broad range of performance experience have exposed him to music of every sort, from classical to jazz, Stetson’s...
Read MoreThe Elks Lodge on Sunset is an imposing house perched on a hill overlooking the northern entrance to the city. Built as a private home over a century ago, it has since 1944 been the home of the Ann Arbor chapter of the Improved...
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“Zero!” the coach yells out with a tone of profound indignation. “Zero points in the fourth quarter! Zero! None! In eight minutes! Eight minutes! Eight minutes! Zero!” Thus begins “Medora,” a...
Read MoreIn 1974, the great tuba player and educator Harvey Phillips organized a concert of tubas and euphoniums playing Christmas carols at the Rockefeller Center skating rink. It was the beginning of a tradition that’s been...
Read MoreThe lobby of the Ann Arbor Ice Cube is overflowing with girls and young women dressed in matching athletic suits. They move in packs, the color of their bright scarves differentiating each team. Their hair pulled back severely,...
Read MoreAs American schools de-emphasized music over the last decades, Chelsea and Saline high schools went in the other direction, forming and marshaling community support for fiddle ensembles that are a great deal of fun and get a lot...
Read MoreFor months, friends had been telling me to check out Captain Ivory, and, when I finally caught up with the band, it more than lived up to the hype. Formed in August 2012 from a series of Basement Tape-inspired jam sessions,...
Read MoreRegional poetry anthologies, like the beautifully produced new collection just issued by Western Michigan University’s New Issues Press and edited by essential Michigan poets William Olsen and Jack Ridl, are meant for a...
Read MoreEMU’s current art exhibit, Non-Text, features an astonishing variety of works by sixteen local and national artists who employ text and type in nontraditional ways. In paintings, drawings, sculptures, and animation,...
Read MoreOn the second floor of the “old” UMMA building, Adolph Gottlieb: Sculptor features shapes resembling stars, suns, moons, and rainbows. The exhibit includes some of the powerful large-scale paintings that are the...
Read MoreKaren Russell is moving fast, and she’s having the kind of enormous early success I thought was no longer possible for a literary writer in America. Her novel Swamplandia!–about a family of alligator wrestlers living...
Read MoreGoogle says there are an estimated fifty million people worldwide who play guitar, twenty million in the U.S. alone. Acoustic guitarist Andy McKee’s 2006 solo live performance of his composition “Drifting” has...
Read MoreThe 338th Army Band is playing triumphantly as we walk into the Crisler Center. We buy our requisite pretzels and sodas, notice that the wheelchair seating is completely full, then walk all the way down to the floor to find...
Read MoreThere are days when it seems that modernism and its descendants have become exhausted and that the arts can strive only to reinvent the past. That is certainly the impression one gets from the work of some of the more publicly...
Read MoreThe Purple Rose’s Vast Difference marks the second time the theater has remounted an early play of its benefactor, Jeff Daniels–the first time was 2008, when it gave Apartment 3A another whirl. Why do they do this?...
Read MoreHannah Arendt, a film about the mid-century German Jewish philosopher who examined the roots of totalitarianism, transports the viewer into a late-1950s world of intellectual New York cocktail parties enveloped in swirling...
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