Tracy Zollinger Turner

A history of Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music.

Sara Wittmeyer accepted the job of news bureau chief of WFIU-FM/WTIU-TV 11 years ago. And while her title has remained the same, her newsroom—now public media’s largest in the state—hasn’t. Under her leadership, the staff has grown from five to 17, reporting across radio, television, and web platforms.

Growing up, Michael Koryta had a soulful relationship with loaded bookshelves. Enthralled by suspenseful stories in the books that surrounded him at home, there was one place in town he could count on to find new realms of adventure.

Interviews with 21 accomplished Black women who live in Bloomington, Indiana.

In the summer of 2018, nurses at the IU Health Bloomington Hospital Hospice House rolled a patient outside in his hospital bed. A horse that had been a part of his family for years awaited him, brought to the facility in a trailer. Nurses put feed in the patient’s hand, allowing the horse and his dying owner to connect one final time.

Following his retirement at the end of 2019, Doug Bauder, founding director of the Indiana University LGBTQ+ Culture Center, is ready to start work on a book reflecting on that experience. He plans to call it The Privilege of Being Queer. “It will be part memoir, part resource for other campuses,” he says. “We’ve heard from hundreds of campuses over 25 years who always asked the same question: How did you do this in Indiana?”

“The challenge of COVID-19—even today, when we know much more about it than we did in the beginning—is still the unknown,” says Dr. William Schmalz of Monroe Hospital. With well over 40 years of experience practicing internal medicine in Indiana, “rarely have I lived with as much uncertainty about a disease state and absolutely no known effective cure, much less appropriate, definitive treatment.”

Aging in our society is tough. For women, there's a lot of pressure to remain youthful, thin and beautiful on the outside — all while trying to take care of our changing bodies and our health. Perimenopause symptoms, in particular, can be challenging to deal with.

Indiana’s dedication to literacy has been etched into law since the state was founded. As early leaders drew up the constitution, the General Assembly passed “An Act for the Incorporation of Public Libraries,” allowing any town, village, or county to form a library once it raised $100.

BY TRACY ZOLLINGER TURNER
Every weekday morning, small groups of preschoolers at Jill’s House Intergenerational Preschool take field trips from their lower-level classrooms up to the first-floor common areas where many of the residents of Jill’s House Assisted Living and Memory Care spend their time. “We use our walking feet, our listening ears, and our quiet voices,” Elizabeth Stelle, director of Jill’s House Intergenerational Preschool, tells her small charges, “because we are entering thei...

Tom Whitehead’s sense of fashion is buttoned-up—literally. “I wear my golf shirt with the top button buttoned,” he says. “I’m of the generation where if you wear brown shoes, you wear a brown belt.” When it comes to what he’ll wear on his feet and ankles, however, all bets are off. “I’m the most conservative guy there is,” he says. “And I wear crazy socks.”

BY TRACY ZOLLINGER TURNER

The dharmachakra (wheel of dharma) that adorns the entry gate of the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center (TMBCC) is almost luminous, freshly gilded for the center’s 40th anniversary celebration. Yet, despite its decades-long history, visitors still ask, “Why is this place in the middle of Indiana?”

Geshe Kunga, one of the spiritual teachers of the Kumbum Chamtse Ling monastery, located on the TMBCC grounds, says the story begins with the center’s founder, Thub...

When Cardinal Stage sold its South Walnut Street building in the spring, moving into a much smaller space shared with the Bloomington Academy of Film & Theatre, it was a complicated prospect. Administrative offices and a prop garage needed to be emptied rapidly, but many of the places that would ordinarily take donated and recyclable materials remained shuttered due to pandemic restrictions.

BY TRACY ZOLLINGER TURNER
On a Saturday morning in December, Republicans and Democrats came together in a Monroe County Public Library meeting room, hoping to learn to better communicate with one another. After drawing up name tags with the appropriate red or blue markers, the 19 participants, gently guided by a trained moderator, shared stories of heated holiday dinner table arguments and friendships lost in the wake of the 2016 election.
The event was a skills workshop designed by Better An...

BY TRACY ZOLLINGER TURNER

Growing up, Robin Edmundson was focused on the codes and puzzle-solving involved in learning new languages. It wasn’t until she was in graduate school working toward a Ph.D. in linguistics that her attention shifted to the vernacular of art.

“I was one of those people who was encouraged not to be artistic as a child,” Edmundson, 55, says of her early life in northern Indiana. That changed when she moved to a farm in Solsberry, Indiana, in the 1990s. There she began t...