2003 October

A few years ago Charles Baxter wrote a love story set in Ann Arbor, The Feast of Love, which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world. Last year I met a couple of Scandinavian writers in Greece who had a vague...

In August 1913, nine-year old Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze became a boarding student at the Imperial Theater Ballet School in St. Petersburg, Russia. A week later, he ran away. Not exactly an auspicious beginning for the...

People trying to make good music in Nashville more or less follow Darrell Scott's every move. He came on the scene with his Aloha from Nashville album six years ago, and it was an absolute gold mine of top- quality country...

I'd spoken to Glori5 guitarist Leighton Mann by phone several times before I saw the band perform. He's soft spoken — a downright respectful intellectual. I hadn't met his wife, Jennifer Albaum, until right...

For years, we had to coax our preschooler into going to “the dinosaur museum” by downplaying the inherently scary aspects of dead creatures on display, some of them enormous. He wasn’t frightened, just...

In nearly five years of poking around local galleries, there have been only three occasions when I stared slack-jawed at a work of art, rapidly calculated my bank balance, and thought, "It's gonna be macaroni and cheese...

What would life be like if we spoke our thoughts out loud? Jimmy Pardo knows. Onstage, he frequently undergoes a bizarre shift from an arrogant moron to an acutely self-conscious, self-doubting boy gone crazy with the...

Could a film as pointedly satirical about our government and its appetite for war as Dr. Strangelove be made today? It's not as if we don't have the material, but which director could skewer the times as thoroughly as...

In the wake of the liberating free jazz movements of the 1950s and 1960s, musicians all over the world reexamined their attitude toward jazz tradition. Perhaps the most radical new trends took place in England, where a small...

So if Hugo Wolf is the greatest song composer in the history of the German language, how come he wasn't famous? Because he had syphilis and died insane? Schubert had syphilis, and Schumann died insane, and no one held it...