In a book of essays marking U-M’s 150th year, playwright Arthur Miller and other distinguished alumni revisit the halcyon days of college. Set against today’s digital backdrop, ‘Our Michigan’ makes a cogent and contemporary case for the bricks-and-mortar learning experience.  

As a kid growing up in southwest Detroit, Manuel “Manny” Martinez played paintball in the hulking, long-abandoned Michigan Central Station. Today, he’s a construction superintendent helping Ford Motor Co. drive the $1 billion transformation of this historic landmark.

U-M’s iconic Elbel Field will be transformed into a marching band practice facility now that the Regents have approved project design plans and authorized construction to proceed.

The garrden, a collaboration between Jewish Family Services of Washtenaw County and Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum, has turned a previously unused, grass-covered space into a fertile, productive plot.

For many, the colorful 3×3 Rubik’s Cube was an infuriating, and largely impossible, puzzle to solve. But for one U-M student, the cube opened doors to international travel, a Guinness World Records entry, and multiple world championship titles.

The London-based team, specializing in extended-reality technology, will be the new 2023 artists in residency at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, in partnership with the U-M Arts Initiative.

To memorialize students who died in service during World War II, U-M officials sought input from such global luminaries as Winston Churchill and Orson Welles. But in the end, a new generation of students created a different kind of tribute — one that could ‘actually do something.’

Visitors to this interactive Ann Arbor exhibit by Brooklyn-based artist and environmental activist Robin Frohardt will immerse in a 6,000-square-foot supermarket in which every banana, every frozen pizza, every sushi roll, and every box of cereal is made of single-use plastic. (Gets a person thinking.) Show runs through Feb. 5.

Don’t call him a ghostwriter. Shape-shifting biographer James Dale, BA ’70, prefers ‘co-author,’ as he pens the life stories of athlete Cal Ripken Jr., sports agent Ron Shapiro, and political activist Elijah Cummings, to name just a few.