Weekender chatted with Howie Day on the phone last week before he rolls into town for a show Friday at the Duke Ellington Ballroom. Weekender: Where are you guys right now? Howie Day: We’re in Philly … One of the 15 straight stops we are making. WE:...

Hip-hop hooray, it’s time for playback, yo. This week’s edition comes from senior kinesiology major Matt Kuhnen. The Monee native dressed up as Simba from “The Lion King” for Halloween last year and plans on doing the same this year. If Kuhnen...

From MTV to NIU, Cribs is in the hizzouse ... well, residence hall. Throughout the semester, Sweeps will delve into the sickest structures inhabited by NIU students. The first thing you notice when you enter this savvy Stevenson pad is the door covered...

Cancer, a disease taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans each year, might have finally met its match: plain, yellow bracelets. Six-time Tour de France winner and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong’s foundation began selling “live strong”...

Every week before NIU football games, Sweeps will bring you the real matchups that matter, like which team mascot would win in a street fight. NIU will travel to Kalamazoo, Mich., this weekend to face off against Western Michigan University looking to...

Fresh out of high school, Raven-Symone is ready to break into the music industry with a new identity. “This Is My Time” is not her first album. She released “Here’s to New Dreams” at age 8 and, in 1999, released “Undeniable.” The entertainment...

A few weeks ago, English instructor Amy Newman visited the Barnes & Noble bookstore to read her newly published series of poems titled “Fall.” A crowd of about 50 NIU students, faculty and friends came to listen to Newman read sections from her...

For a movie about ballroom dancing, its outcome is pretty decent. Directed by Peter Chelsom (“Serendipity,” “Town & Country”), “Shall We Dance?” is a movie about Chicago accountant John Clark (Richard Gere), who is happily married but...

With the presidential election less than two weeks away, Weekender wanted to find out which celebrities you would like to see not endorse candidates, but take up a campaign of their own: Krist Novoselic, the former Nirvana bassist, with aspirations of...

Every year, the third Saturday in October provokes relationship carnage over non-existent gifts, half-hearted gestures and those strange looks you keep giving that poster of the hot Olsen twin. Sweetest Day (or as I call it, the annual “Greg, you will...

Weekender needs your help. For the section’s Halloween edition, running Oct. 28, we hope to send students on a frigid, ghoulish race. We are looking for teams of two to four students to help us with the upcoming cover story. The Jonamac Orchard in Malta...

The terms “lo-fi” and “DIY” aren’t usually associated with dense layers of samples, drum loops, multiple-part harmonies and music so complex that it requires five multi-instrumentalists to play it live when it was recorded by only two. Yet the...