Saturday · The big one
Football vs Penn State
3:30 PM at Michigan Stadium. It’s Homecoming weekend — downtown will be maize-and-blue chaos from late morning, in the best way.
Nothing matches that combo
Try loosening a toggle — or clear the search. These filters only search the 24 curated picks. Weekday (Mon–Thu) picks aren’t in this snapshot yet — they join with the Sunday-night refresh, when the page rebuilds fresh for the week and weekend ahead.
What we left out — on purpose
The U-M feed is built for campus, not for neighbors. Of the 181 Fri–Sun listings in this snapshot, the majority never made this page — and weekday listings haven’t been curated into picks yet:
Cut from the picks
- Student-only stuff — resume labs, shop orientations, housing socials, career workshops.
- Recurring exhibits — a dozen gallery shows run all week, every week. Worth a rainy day, not a “pick.”
- Weekdays, for now — Mon–Thu listings are in the full 393-event feed, but this snapshot only curated Fri–Sun into picks. The page now runs the full week, and the Sunday-night refresh is what populates Mon–Thu so the list is fresh for the week and the weekend.
- Out-of-town listings — the feed includes U-M teams competing in Boston and Cambridge. Not a drive you’re making.
- One canceled city event was excluded by the pipeline before it ever reached this page.
Kept, but flagged honestly
- Sold out stays visible — Mike Dawes at The Ark (Fri) is sold out. It’s listed anyway, badged, so you don’t waste a trip downtown.
- “Free” ≠ “just show up.” Some free events still ask you to sign up (the park workdays). The badges keep those separate.
- Unknown means unknown. Where a feed didn’t state a price, the card says “See official site” instead of guessing.
- Deduped — with a caveat: the pipeline merged 24 duplicate records, all of them inside the U-M feed (an exhibition merged with its own opening reception, and the like). Cross-source overlaps it did not catch — Carbon Leaf, Emily Slomovits, and Gaelynn Lea each appear in both the U-M and Ark feeds — are shown once here by hand. Cross-source dedup is still the unproven part.
How far are you willing to drive?
Events are grouped by drive commitment, not just distance. This page is Ring 1 only — that’s the MVP rule.
Ring 1 · Live now
Core Washtenaw
Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Dexter, Saline, Chelsea. Under ~20 minutes for most locals — the “I’m bored right now” zone. All 24 picks above are in this ring.
Ring 2 · Coming later
Metro Excursion
Plymouth & Northville, Ferndale & Royal Oak, downtown Detroit. Worth the drive for the right show — but it’s a plan, not a whim. Added only after Ring 1 earns repeat visits.
How this page is made — and hosted
No scraping, no invented details. Facts are extracted from structured feeds, never generated.
1
Structured feeds in
U-M events JSON, the City of Ann Arbor calendar JSON (it even carries canceled / sold-out / deadline flags), The Ark’s event API, and the Farm Council calendar. 393 upcoming events in the latest run, zero fetch failures.
2
Normalize & dedupe
Every event is mapped to one schema — time, venue, price, free / sold-out / sign-up status — then deduplicated on date + fuzzy title/venue match. 24 duplicates merged in the latest run — all within the U-M feed; cross-source dedup is still unproven (see the caveat above).
3
Fetched ≠ verified
A feed loading successfully doesn’t prove the details are current. That’s why every card carries a Verify on official site button, and corrections will be human-made, sourced, and logged — never silent edits.
So — how is this hosted?
Right now: this page is a single static HTML file (no server, no database) served from Muse’s artifact hosting on a shareable link — $0 to run, which is the right price for an MVP. The event data is baked in at build time from the pipeline run of Fri Oct 16, 2026, 2:41 PM ET; a rebuild refreshes it.
The cadence from here: a Sunday-night refresh — the pipeline re-runs and the page rebuilds for the full week ahead (Mon–Sun, rolling into the next weekend), so it’s fresh on Monday morning, not just on Friday. That’s also when Mon–Thu picks get curated in, instead of the list stopping at Sunday.
When it graduates: the exact same static files move to a static host (Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, or Vercel — all have free tiers plenty for this), pointed at your own domain (~$10–14/year, registered in your name). The pipeline then rebuilds and redeploys the page on that Sunday-night schedule, and the Thursday email goes out through a real email service (Buttondown or Resend) once you create that account and hand over an API key securely. Nothing about the page’s design has to change to make that move.
The Thursday Briefing
The 10 best things happening in Core Washtenaw across the week ahead — weeknights included, not just the weekend — in your inbox every Thursday morning, so the plan makes itself. Events come first on this page; the email is the reminder, not the gate.
Newsletter sending starts once an email service is connected — submitting opens a pre-addressed signup email so your address is captured the honest way, with nothing sent behind your back.