The print and publishing industries may be in flux, but a force has emerged that is making a significant impact on the way we see, or rather hear, the printed word. Despite the well-documented changes in the book industry, it appears that audio books are here to stay-and in the process, they may even save you a buck or two. Given their accessibility and transportability, audio books add another dimension to educating and entertaining our society. Granted, many...

The enduring fantasy of older men is that a gorgeous young woman will fall in love with them, find them sexually arousing and long to imbibe their wisdom while sitting at their feet. That fantasy is the spring driving Woody Allen's often-hilarious farce, Whatever Works, and as any reader of People magazine knows, the fantasy worked for him in real life, too. But Allen has enough wit to undermine his own proposition by movie's end. Celebrity gossip hounds may wonder what the story's twisting plot says about the director's marriage to his younger...

July 3 in Milwaukee draws legions of patriots to the bluffs and shorefront of Lake Michigan for the city’s yearly fireworks show. As people drive, stroll, bike and rollerblade their way through the East Side to the lakefront, they’re crossing land that was once occupied by one of Milwaukee’s three civil...

In the era somewhere between the sexual revolution and the popular realization that indiscriminate sex can kill, a young David Mamet wrote a play about the sex lives of young, urban Midwesterners. Some 30 years later, the once controversial Sexual Perversity in Chicago is being staged at the Alchemist Theatre on South Kinnickinnic Avenue...

In 1998, Debra Brehmer curated an exhibition called "Sweeping and Cleaning: Order and Chaos in Domestic Life." Included in the catalog was the following line from Emily Dickinson: "God keep me from what they call households." I like households, however, having lived in approximately 40, some shabby and some splendiferous...

When he emerged as part of New York's edgy "downtown scene" in the 1970s, Philip Glass became the target of vituperative put-downs by the older generation of modernist composers and critics in their thrall, who composed and appreciated music according to the dictates of increasingly sterile intellectual theories. Fortunately, the spirit of those composers migrated to university...