Here’s a thought: Somewhere in the American Southwest—the exact location is a highly guarded secret—is a Great Basin bristlecone that botanists and foresters estimate to be 4,500 years old. It […]
He had been warned. At a recent house concert in Printers Row, Pat Byrne, a soulful Irish troubadour based in Texas, bravely took a swig of the yellow liquid, scrunched […]
The key moment in John William Nelson’s important, original, and eye-opening history of the place that became the city of Chicago—Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of […]
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson inaugurated the Chicago Humanities Festival’s autumn 2024 season in front of a packed, enthusiastic crowd at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. In […]
Avid book lovers can be a solitary bunch—after all, it’s hard to lug our stacks (and stacks) of books around a party. But that is exactly what’s about to go […]
Chicago’s literary scene is, in a word, “lit”: from the Midwest’s largest free outdoor literary festival to pop-up typewritten poetry encounters to the nation’s only museum devoted to American writers, […]
As we navigate the current Gilded Age, it’s helpful to reflect on the last one. The Driehaus Museum at 40 East Erie is showcasing 200 pieces of dazzling past and […]
Weeds Tavern is a bar biography, but something more, and slightly less. More or less an artist’s monograph, SunTimes writer and critic Dave Hoekstra covers the titular Chicago tavern’s background […]
Reggie Watts is far more than James Corden’s bandleader on the former The Late Late Show. He’s an innovative musician (keyboard, looping machine, beatboxer), dry comedian, wearer of cool geometric […]
Kathleen Hanna, founding Riot Grrrl, Bikini Kill frontwoman and the person who told Kurt Cobain that he smelled like teen spirit, is currently on tour to promote her memoir Rebel […]
Chicago musicians Chance the Rapper, Jennifer Hudson, plus legendary producer Quincy Jones, recently opened the renovated Ramova Theatre. The interior’s quaint cityscape-inside-a-building balconies and windows have been restored to usher […]
Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and avoided assassination? What if I had taken a […]