Jerry and Estelle Cimino are on the road, spreading the Beat Gospel to the world. As founders of the Beat Museum in San Francisco, they’ve made a mission of keeping […]

When I visited the Newberry Library Book Fair on Friday, I knew I had to come up with a strategy.  It’s a locally famous sale, featuring tens of thousands of […]

Jennifer Berne wrote the storybook Calvin Can’t Fly: The Story of a Bookworm Birdie in 2010, and her second cousin Sarah Michaelson directed and produced a video version last year. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]