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 Humanities Festival continued its Chicago Neighborhood Series with a panel of three journalists from Chicago’s community media, mainly focusing on the south side. The panel was moderated by Bettina Chang, […]
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 […]
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 the First […]
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 […]
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 law and […]
Four Chicagoans—and one cute and persistent dog—joined together in the Chicago Humanities Festival panel “Youth Leading Change” to discuss grief, collective action, hope, and radical love. The panel began in silence, a […]
