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.

After a dazzling turn with Jimmy Stewart in what would become an iconic holiday classic, Virginia Patton stepped out of the Hollywood spotlight. She traded the film industry for an illustrious life in Ann Arbor.