Arts & Life

Books

MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS
                                Michael J. Clark is a local suspense/crime author who writes his books using manual typewriters. He began collecting the machines in 2015.

Writer’s got a type

Winnipeg author relies on typewriter collection to punch out manuscripts

Sheldon Birnie 7 minute read Thursday, Sep. 17, 2026

Advertisement

Advertise With Us

Weather

Sep. 19, 12 PM: 18°c Cloudy with wind Sep. 19, 6 PM: 18°c Cloudy with wind

Winnipeg MB

15°C, Cloudy

Full Forecast

The Arts

Quilt tradition from Underground Railroad period big part of new exhibition

Conrad Sweatman 5 minute read Preview

Quilt tradition from Underground Railroad period big part of new exhibition

Conrad Sweatman 5 minute read Yesterday at 2:00 AM CDT

Long before she became a professional quilter, Melinda Clayton Patterson used to watch her mother make quilts from clothing scraps and cardboard templates.

“I came from a family of 14 kids, so going to whatever the store was back then, K-Mart or Woolworth, to buy quilts or blankets for 14 kids was just not feasible because the people were not wealthy,” she says.

“Quilts were not viewed as art. But when I came to Winnipeg, I started taking quilting seriously in my 30s … the heritage came later.”

Today, the 61-year-old native of East Preston, N.S., lives in Winnipeg, stitching together stories of her Black Loyalist heritage and Preston’s foundational role in the birth of Canadian Black culture.

Read
Yesterday at 2:00 AM CDT

Music

The sound of infinity: Hurdy-gurdy show coming to St. Norbert Arts Centre

Ben Waldman 3 minute read Preview

The sound of infinity: Hurdy-gurdy show coming to St. Norbert Arts Centre

Ben Waldman 3 minute read Yesterday at 2:00 AM CDT

Quintin Bart’s favourite instrument has a name that’s easy to remember and it makes a sound that’s difficult to forget.

Say it with us — hurdy-gurdy.

Functioning like a wheeled, crank-activated violin, Bart’s trapezoidal instrument produces a continuous range of sound by manipulation of two drone strings, two melody strings and one trompette string. As the wheel spins in a single direction, the music created can last as long as the crank turns.

“I like to think of it as an analogue synthesizer,” says Bart, a jazz-minded Winnipeg folk musician who has used the baroque tool in performances with artists including Matt Foster and Raine Hamilton.

Read
Yesterday at 2:00 AM CDT

The Arts

Powerful personal drama provides both bark and bite

Ben Waldman 3 minute read Preview

Powerful personal drama provides both bark and bite

Ben Waldman 3 minute read Wednesday, Sep. 16, 2026

Well before playwright Rafaella Marcus’ words have the chance to entangle us in the stickiness of Sap, the performance space initiates the task in director Elio Zarrillo’s staging of this discomfiting and affecting story of restraint and liberation.

Shortly after the audience takes its seats in four segments surrounding a central channel — a shimmering tunnel containing cellist Grace Morningstar — it becomes clear as actors Hera Nalam and Liz Whitbread make their way around the tight corners of David Oro and Hazel Venzon’s set that certain actions will go unseen unless viewers keeps their heads on a swivel: in a production meant to uproot understanding, a fixed perspective will never do.

In this vulnerable and powerful production from Theatre by the River (105 minutes) the actors meet the excellence of Marcus’s twisty script, which calls for emotionally draining and jolting depictions of a relationship headed down a rocky road.

Nalam plays a young communications pro for a women’s aid charity whose dating life is a work in progress. She’s bright and optimistic, taking notice of elements of nature that nobody else seems to recognize. On her daily commute, she looks out from the bus window in awe of a home overflowing with branches and leaves.

Read
Wednesday, Sep. 16, 2026

Faith

New laws trigger a fresh legal fight over Nazi-looted art in Los Angeles and Auschwitz museums

Deepa Bharath, The Associated Press 7 minute read Preview

New laws trigger a fresh legal fight over Nazi-looted art in Los Angeles and Auschwitz museums

Deepa Bharath, The Associated Press 7 minute read 6:15 AM CDT

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jewish heirs of Holocaust victims and their representatives have filed two lawsuits in California staking their claims to Nazi-looted paintings that still hang on the walls of prominent museums in Los Angeles and Auschwitz.

This pair of lawsuits are the first to be filed after the recent passage of laws by California and Congress, which strengthen U.S.-based claims to artwork that were forcibly taken from Jewish families during World War II.

One lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and its board chair Daniel Gryczman against Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena for the return of “Adam and Eve.” These are two life-size oil-on-panel masterpieces created by Lucas Carnach the Elder in 1530.

The other lawsuit was filed in federal court in Los Angeles the same day by the daughters of the late Dinah Gottliebova Babbitt, a Holocaust survivor and California-based animator who was held in Auschwitz. It demanded the return of watercolors of fellow prisoners that the artist was forced to paint for Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician who had earned the nickname the “Angel of Death.”

Read
6:15 AM CDT

Arts & Entertainment

Munich’s Oktoberfest roars to life as the mayor taps the first keg

The Associated Press 2 minute read 5:48 AM CDT

MUNICH (AP) — Munich's Oktoberfest kicked off Saturday with the city's mayor tapping the first keg of beer and opening the 191st edition of the world's largest folk festival.

Mayor Dominik Krause put the first keg on tap with only two strokes and the traditional cry of “O’zapft is” — or “It's been tapped.”

Thousands of revelers — the women dressed in Bavarian dirndls, the men in lederhosen — stormed the beer tents on Munich's Theresienwiese fairground in the morning to get a good spot on the benches. To the sounds of brass music and the taste of freshly tapped beer, they soon started singing, dancing and swaying.

Besides beer, pretzels, pork roast and sausages were also sought-after delicacies.

Science & Technology

Will AI models achieve the ability to improve autonomously? Leading labs say the scenario is near

Kaitlyn Huamani And Barbara Ortutay, The Associated Press 6 minute read Preview

Will AI models achieve the ability to improve autonomously? Leading labs say the scenario is near

Kaitlyn Huamani And Barbara Ortutay, The Associated Press 6 minute read 5:00 AM CDT

Once a distant ambition for technology researchers, the prospect of artificial intelligence models teaching themselves autonomously to be more efficient and capable appears ever closer to reality.

As the technology advances, developers say it is approaching “recursive self-improvement,” or RSI, in which AI models find ways to improve themselves and build their successor. It could bring the promise of advances in science and medicine, tech company executives say, but also risks.

The uncertainty over where it all could lead is at the heart of growing fears about AI evading human control, and possible threats to humanity, which led several AI moguls to join last weekend in a call to slow down the technology’s pace of growth.

Anthropic this week detailed how its model Claude is helping the company to develop the next, more intelligent version of itself. Claude is now leading 26% of Anthropic’s model research and development, which the company said means it can complete most of a given task “end-to-end from a high-level prompt” while still being under human supervision. The models are not working completely autonomously — at least not yet.

Read
5:00 AM CDT

Diversions

More Arts & Life

Puzzles Palace is home to your favourite word games and brain teasers.  Enjoy seven Sudokus, five crosswords (including the Thomas Joseph and Premier) as well as two new puzzles: Word Sleuth and Plus One.

Challenge yourself in Puzzles Palace

Puzzles Palace is home to your favourite word games and brain teasers. Enjoy seven Sudokus, five crosswords (including the Thomas Joseph and Premier) as well as two new puzzles: Word Sleuth and Plus One.

Books

Give-and-take relationship of Roman leaders takes centre stage in Harris’s historical fiction

Reviewed by Kathryne Cardwell 4 minute read Preview

Give-and-take relationship of Roman leaders takes centre stage in Harris’s historical fiction

Reviewed by Kathryne Cardwell 4 minute read 2:01 AM CDT

British novelist Robert Harris’s latest work is a reflection on tyranny, corruption and betrayal among all-powerful political leaders.

You might be forgiven for thinking it’s a contemporary thriller — it’s actually historical fiction set in ancient Rome.

A former BBC journalist, Harris debuted as a novelist in 1992 with Fatherland, an alternative history where Nazi Germany won the Second World War.

Since then, the prolific author has become best-known for his works of historical fiction, especially his ancient Rome trilogy released from 2006-2015 and the novel Conclave, which was published in 2016 and was made into the film of the same name in 2024.

Read
2:01 AM CDT

Books

Grieving child builds backyard rocket ship

Harriet Zaidman 4 minute read 2:01 AM CDT

I Built a Rocket Ship (Kids Can Press, 32 pages, hardcover, $22) by Winnipegger Anna Lazowski is a tender story for children ages 4-8 about a little girl trying to make sense of her mother’s death. The child engages in conversation with her late mom, agreeing and disagreeing about things said as she carries objects (and of course, the cat) to the backyard. There, she is building a rocket ship she will pilot into the skies to find her mom again.

Jennica Lounsbury’s varied perspectives show the range of emotions the little girl experiences.

● ● ●

Northwoods Lullaby by Mary Casanova (University of Minnesota Press, 32 pages, hardover, $25) is a bedtime book for readers up to age eight, perfect to bring a busy, happy day to a close. Just like children who are listening to adults reading the book, all the animal babies are being tucked into their nests and burrows by loving parents: “Thump and scamper,/nimble clover./ Soon it’s time to rest. Baby loon/ nestles in/as Papa floats along.”

Books

Near-future U.S. the setting for surreal dual-world storyline

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read Preview

Near-future U.S. the setting for surreal dual-world storyline

Reviewed by Morley Walker 4 minute read 2:01 AM CDT

It’s not every day you encounter a seriously intended literary novel that attempts to dramatize a mind-bending physics theory like quantum entanglement.

But then the B.C.-born-and-raised Emily St. John Mandel is not your everyday Canadian literary writer.

In her late 40s, she has lived in the U.S. for her entire writing career. She is best known for her 2014 dystopian novel Station Eleven, about a Shakespearean acting troupe navigating a pandemic-ravaged America.

Her new outing, her seventh, Exit Party, shares DNA with detective and sci-fi genres more than with conventional literary fiction.

Read
2:01 AM CDT

LOAD MORE ARTS & LIFE ARTICLES