Both Leonnig and Mitchell cover Washington, or elements thereof, and they began the conversation by noting that the Secret Service is not, for the most part, its own beat. Since […]
Exploring the Land of Lincoln: The Essential Guide to Illinois Historic Sites By Charles Titus 3 Fields Books I asked my non-Illinoisan Twitter followers to tell me three things they […]
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 […]
The Chicago Humanities Festival and host Geoffrey Stone set the stage for a lively, often heated, discussion on hate speech when it chose two panel members with opposing views on […]
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 […]
For the Love of Cod: A Father and Son’s Search for Norwegian Happiness Eric Dregni University of Minnesota Press Eric Dregni is only partly Norwegian but that hasn’t stopped him […]
Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town By Jason Stacy University of Illinois Press It’s ironic that Spoon River Anthology—perhaps the most famous […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are private entities even though we may think of them as similar to public “marketplaces of ideas.” A panel of three experts on […]
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 […]