By Carr Harkrader With its dramatic palazzo ornamentation, twinkling star-lit ceiling, and mischievous cherubs nuzzling within insets, the Music Box Theatre was perhaps the perfect place for a talk with the performer […]
Salman Rushdie is sometimes asked why, in this age of lies, he chooses to write fiction, adding more untruths to this disjointed world. Rushdie and poet Srikanth Reddy’s Chicago Humanities Festival conversation […]
History doesn’t repeat, Mark Twain said: it rhymes. And, as poet and playwright Cornelius Eady and performer Joe Morton both noted during their conversation about Eady’s Brutal Imagination, it keeps on rhyming, […]
DeeMost of us don’t think of imagination when we think of the Secret Service, if we think of them at all. They’re the President’s bodyguards, after all, and how much imagination does […]
The Chicago River, as many of us know, once flowed the other way, into Lake Michigan. It was reversed—a triumph of engineering, at the time—to move sewage and waste water away from […]
What do junior high school science, science fiction, string theory, the God equation, and Elvis Presley have in common? They all played a starring role in physicist Michio Kaku and actor LeVar […]
Most of us probably don’t think of economics as an optimistic field. For some of us it pulls up thoughts of Milton Friedman; for others, it’s relegated to a class taken, or […]
A parade of artists and pop art, literary and music figures from mid-century America populate Louis Menand’s new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. The book looks […]
When one speaks more than one language, and moves from one to another with any degree of frequency, one runs into them: words that don’t quite translate, because they’re not just a […]
Ray Bradbury’s work and reputation have aged like fine dandelion wine. Unlike many of his fellow 20th century science-fiction and fantasy writers, he’s entered the current millennium fairly woke and relatively […]
What if you could build a holographic map, in which all America’s Indigenous poets, from the beginning of time until now, were mapped, linking out to their works and their words? Joy […]
As if to prove his versatility as a writer and creator, George Saunders’ latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is not a work of his own creation but […]
