Karin McKie is a Chicago freelance writer, cultural factotum and activism concierge. She jams econo.
What do theater artists do when creative offerings morph post-COVID? What do theatrical spaces become in this life-after-coronavirus reset? Creators gonna create, here with a new experience called Whim Chicago, an […]
The Chicago Humanities Festival presented a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s hour-long masterpiece The Kid, at the Music Box Theater on November 5, with whimsical, period intertitles (handwritten, but similar to […]
Oak Forest native to the “political left of Gandhi,” essayist and award-winning author George Saunders returned to Chicagoland to talk about writing with Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me host Peter Sagal. “The Art of the Short […]
On July 27, 1919, 17-year-old Eugene Williams went swimming near Chicago’s 29th Street beach. The raft he and his other Black friends had constructed drifted into a whites-only swimming area, where […]
Last spring, the Chicago Humanities Festival offered a bus tour of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, and this September, offered a tour of the nearby South Shore neighborhood. South Shore is a mostly African […]
National Hispanic American Heritage Month (September 15-October 15) started off strong with the Chicago Humanities Fest’s Pilsen Mural Tour, following last spring’s other insightful, invigorating neighborhood tours. Local muralist Sam Kirk walked a lively […]
Jill Lepore wrote about America’s first political spin doctors ten years ago in The New Yorker. She called the California political consulting team of Leone Baxter and Clem Whittaker “The Lie […]
Chicago’s Physical Theater Festival returns for the ninth year with in-person, indoor and outdoor performances, plus four workshops by festival artists, July 16-24, following the 2020 virtual festival. The week features performances by […]
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, […]
On paper, the Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved Americans on January 1, 1863, during the middle of the Civil War. But not all chattel slaves were immediately manumitted. Union General Gordon […]
Politics are exhausting, but inevitable and important. People are exhausted, but continue to seek normalcy via social interactions. The Second City’s 110th mainstage show’s bifurcated title reflects those two realities: Do […]
The Chicago Humanities Festival sponsored a bus tour of Chicago’s South Side, the “Black Belt,” for the spring Public-themed series. Hosted by “TikTok historian” Shermann “Dilla” Thomas, the two-hour tour began […]