Narrative nonfiction titan Sarah Vowell closed the diverse and well-curated Chicago Humanities Festival’s 30th anniversary “Power” juggernaut Sunday at Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park, showcasing her acerbic wit and keen […]
By Valerie Nikolas Power. It’s the theme of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF), now in its 30th year of attracting compelling and thoughtful speakers to Chicago. It’s also the central theme in […]
Emmy Award-winning host of the eponymous MSNBC program Rachel Maddow made a book tour stop on October 12 at McCormick Place’s Arie Crown Theater, as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s packed […]
Plenty of writers have mastered their craft, but few have fostered a genre. Howard Phillips Lovecraft—purveyor of pulp fictional cosmic terror—did both. Dying at age 46 on March 15, 1937, in penniless, […]
What’s the status of art in state of the art video games? Do pixelated citizens have a sense of aesthetics? Will we find a Van Gogh or Basquiat skin among the boogying […]
Mary Gibbons, co-owner of Pilsen Community Books says her store had a bevy of books… Nay—a surfeit of books… Strike that—a profound profusion, if not potential plethora of books in storage, doing no […]
Long before the podcast, there was Third Coast International Audio Festival. Since 2000, Third Coast has been a leader in audio storytelling, paving the way for this craft back when our ears […]
New York-based writer L.A. Chandlar is the author of The Silver Gun and the just-published The Gold Pawn, the first two books in her Art Deco Mystery series. I spoke with her by […]
I wish I could describe Edward McClelland in legendary terms—it would be so damned apropos. I’d tell you he’s as tall as a redwood, as strong as a herd of wild […]
Cemeteries remind us this is a city of change in multiple ways. Not just the impermanence and fragility of life, but in the ways the landscape of the city shifts with growth. […]
Gift-giving season is upon us, and with it the existential dread that comes with finding the perfect present. In our modern age of two-day shipping, free returns, and constant stream of transactions, […]
Ever scribbled a substitution in the margins of a cookbook? That page is technically now a manuscript, which is the main ingredient of a culinary history. Culinary history focuses on how food […]
