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By STEVE PFARRER

HOLYOKE — Police have arrested two men in connection with two recent fatal shootings in the city.The Hampden District Attorney’s Office said Angel Velez of Springfield and Victor Diaz-Torres of Holyoke were both arrested late last week in separate...

By STEVE PFARRER

In the musical world, it’s now a classic comeback story: how jazz singer Melody Gardot, then 19 years old, was struck by a car while bicycling in her native Philadelphia in 2003 and suffered serious head and spinal injuries, a broken pelvis, and...

By STEVE PFARRER

NORTHAMPTON — For the last few years, Jeremy Macomber-Dubs has been advocating for people with disabilities. As someone who uses a wheelchair because he struggles with the effects of brittle bone disease, Macomber-Dubs know it’s a challenge to...

By STEVE PFARRER

AMHERST — Over 30 years ago, Glenn Siegel, then working as a jazz DJ at WMUA-FM at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, went to talk to Frederick Tillis, the director of the university’s Fine Arts Center. Siegel and some other jazz DJs at the...

By STEVE PFARRER

Back in 1982, a new feminist ensemble called Double Edge Theatre formed in Boston and presented its first production: “RITES,” an adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy “The Bacchae” by Euripides, with this modern version set in a women’s public...

By STEVE PFARRER

Todd Snider has been through a number of changes since he burst on the national music scene in 1994 with his debut album, “Songs for the Daily Planet,” a roots-rock record on which the singer-songwriter first unveiled his penchant for biting satire as...

By STEVE PFARRER

HOLYOKE — Following ongoing drug investigations, police arrested three people over the weekend, charging two of the defendants with trafficking in heroin.The arrests were made early Friday in two separate locations in the city, during raids that took...

By STEVE PFARRER

AMHERST — It began as a one-building school, with a few dozen students, a tiny handful of faculty, and a curriculum based around math, Latin, oratory, philosophy and, above all, piety. The school’s founders wanted to provide a classical education for...

By STEVE PFARRER

Mail art, as Dean Brown explains, became a big deal in the late 1960s and the 1970s, a populist movement based on sending small-scale artworks — drawings, paintings, graphic designs and more — through the Postal Service.Over the past couple of...

By STEVE PFARRER

In the 1990s, Sally Greenhouse had a regular gig on Northampton Community Television (now Northampton Open Media, or NOM) with her show “The Greenhouse Effect,” a combination of performance art, monologue and comedy in which the multidisciplinary...

By STEVE PFARRER

For a long time, he was unsure of his singing voice, wondering if it was really good enough to front a band. And for a good part of the time he was making albums, he also shunned most live performances, not feeling he could sing in front of an...

By STEVE PFARRER

In the early 1900s, few young American women were allowed to go about unchaperoned. Fewer still would likely have been permitted to attend college on their own, almost 500 miles from home, and at the tender age of 16.But the painter and printmaker...

By STEVE PFARRER

In a childhood that had its fair share of pain and confusion, Jarrett J. Krosoczka can recall a couple of incidents that really stood out.When he was three, his grandparents, Joe and Shirley Krosoczka, told him a few days before Christmas that he’d be...

By STEVE PFARRER

By day, he’s in the classroom, leading discussions on ethics, value, knowledge and other philosophical questions, as well as the ideas of specific philosophers themselves.By night, he leads a different kind of discussion — a performance, really — that...

By STEVE PFARRER

 Carol Neubert took piano lessons for several years when she was growing up, learned to read music and figured out how to play the instrument — to a degree.“My right hand can play the piano well, and my left hand plays well, but they do not play well...

By STEVE PFARRER

A hundred years ago, there was one relatively efficient way of crossing the country: by rail. To do it by road required using a patchwork of mostly unimproved surfaces — dirt, gravel, and sometimes just sand — on motorized vehicles that were still in...

By STEVE PFARRER

What’s the connection between tribal art, illustrations of animals and natural settings like forests, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? If you answered “none,” you haven’t met the Derby family of Northampton. Charles Derby, a onetime art teacher...

By STEVE PFARRER

Octopuses sprawled in armchairs, reading books; tiny mermaids riding on squids. Frogs that skim above the ground on mobile lily pads like flying carpets. And a boy who makes friends with a small cloud at the Empire State building and rides around on...

By STEVE PFARRER

Her basic storyline is well known: successful poet and novelist before she turned 30, one half of a literary couple who had a famously stormy relationship, and — sadly — a suicide in 1963, just as her work was beginning to achieve wider notice.But...

By STEVE PFARRER

Jim Lumley learned to appreciate nature’s beauty at an early age.His parents, the late Mabel and Al Lumley, planted extensive lilac bushes on the family’s Pelham property, which for decades has been a popular visiting site for lilac lovers, picnickers...