Chicago Humanities Spring Festival boasts Leslie Odom Jr., Eve Ewing and Paul Reiser — because culture isn't dead yet
The world is on fire, and night is day, and war is peace.
And yet, the Chicago Humanities Festival is doubling down.
You might even say its Spring Festival, which begins later this week and runs through early June, looks so committed to rallying a defense to the New Reality, it's provocative.
How else to read a festival of ideas featuring best-selling historian Timothy Snyder on freedom, plus historian Heather Cox Richardson (of the popular newsletter 'Letters From an American') on the need to revitalize democracy? (Both are part of the festival's Lakeview Day at the Athenaeum on April 27.) Want to hear directly from the front lines? David Rubenstein, always the most interesting person in the room, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, former chair at the Smithsonian, current chair of the board of trustees at the University of Chicago and chair emeritus of the Brookings Institution, will likely talk about being fired by President Donald Trump from his position as chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. (That's April 21.) Activist Tamika Mallory (May 18) will discuss the creation of the Women's March. Deborah N. Archer (April 24) will talk about what it's like to be president of the ACLU now, and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (May 18) will talk about facing armed protestors in 2020 who insisted that Trump won the election.
A single afternoon at Bridgeport Day (May 10, at the Ramova Theater and the Co-Prosperity gallery) plays like its own pointed argument for the importance of the free thinking, featuring an all-star group of 21st-century intellectuals: At 4 p.m., Chicago's Eve Ewing discusses her excellent new book, 'Original Sins,' on the history of how American schools fail Black and Indigenous students; at 1 p.m., Maggie Nelson links personal jaw pain with the current need to connect socially; and at 2:30 p.m., essayist Rebecca Solnit talks a bit of everything — abuse of power, climate change, democracy …
In fact, if you're feeling excessively distracted by social media lately, there's also a chat for that: MSNBC's Chris Hayes on March 17. Issues with capitalism? That's the New Yorker's John Cassidy on May 18. Just don't know how to argue with people anymore? University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard makes a case for Socrates on April 27.
Thoughtful-palooza?
Sanctuary City Limits?
Maybe the Chicago Humanities Festival just needs a better name now, a reminder the humanities is the study of culture. For instance, May 18 (Lincoln Park Day, at the Chicago History Museum), you could hear Chicago cartoonist Chris Ware discuss R. Crumb with his new biographer Dan Nadel, then return that afternoon for Ibram X. Kendi ('How to Be an Antiracist') talking about his new young-adult biography of Malcolm X — and a conversation with Broadway producer Jeffrey Seller, of 'Hamilton' and 'Rent.'
I almost feel bad for the festival's relatively lightweight opener: Paul Reiser, at the Music Box on Thursday. Speaking of 'Hamilton' — Leslie Odom Jr. (he won a Tony Award for playing Aaron Burr in the original cast) sings at an Art Institute of Chicago Day on June 7. That same day at the museum, there's a chat with cartoonist Alison Bechdel ('Fun Home'), and, apologies to hipsters for burying the lede here: Director Jim Jarmusch (on guitar) will deliver a very rare concert with experimental lute player Jozef van Wissem.
Should art for art's sake prove too slight right now, might I suggest comedian Ed Helms, who brings his popular 'SNAFU' podcast to Chicago (May 3) to discuss the history of huge (and quite real) fiascos, from CIA-trained feline spies to Project A119, an United States Air Force plan to detonate a nuke on the moon, as a show of military strength.
See? The world has always been full of wackos.
The question is, after the chatting, discussing and thinking — are we going to do something?
The Chicago Humanities Spring Festivals begins March 13 and runs through early June. For information on additonal events, times, locations and ticket prices, visit chicagohumanities.org.
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Chicago Tribune
7 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
To know them is to loath them: Oak Park's Alec Nevala-Lee finds a niche, writing about science's biggest jerks
Luis W. Alvarez, physicist, genius, conspiracy debunker, military hawk, Zelig, University of Chicago dyspeptic, to cut to the chase, was not a very pleasant man. He was not especially liked by colleagues. It's hard to tell if he was even liked by his kids. And so, for Alec Nevala-Lee of Oak Park, who has become an underrated biographer of Great Jerks in Science, Alvarez was perfect. Nevala-Lee's previous biography was on Buckminster Fuller, architect, futurist, longtime professor at Southern Illinois University, but also an infamously obtuse, inscrutable mansplainer's mansplainer — his lectures seemed to go on for days. Before that, Nevala-Lee wrote 'Astounding,' a harrowing account of the men behind mid-century science fiction, particularly editor John W. Campbell, who could be described charitably as fascist. His next book, already in the works, is about those lovable scamps behind the RAND Corporation, the most despised think tank in history. Am I nuts or do I see a pattern here? 'No question!' Nevala-Lee said the other day, getting a little loud in his neighborhood library. 'I like intelligent people who succeed in one field only to try and apply those skills elsewhere and decide that they should convince the world that only they have the answer to certain problems.' At the risk of playing pop psychologist, I asked a natural follow-up: Is that you, too? 'I mean, uh… I it.' He smiled. 'Am I a reasonably intelligent person who thought a lot about where to apply their skills? Sure.' I asked this because he attended Harvard University and left with a degree in classics and an over-confident idea that knowing the classics was really the only way to become a writer. So when his fiction-writing career stalled before it could get started, he decided to reinvent himself. He developed a talent for writing quite accessible histories of the boorish. The boorish, but brilliant. As Nevala-Lee explains in 'Collisions: A Physicist's Journey From Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs,' his surprisingly breezy new history of Luis Alvarez, the Nobel laureate and occasional Chicagoan was pragmatic, for better and for worse. He preferred to work where his skills would get noticed by the widest number of important people — smartly leading to funding and fame. Alvarez had, Nevala-Lee writes, taste when it came to science. Meaning, eventually, after years of frustration in Hyde Park, he knew how to pick projects that 'were both achievable and important.' Which is an understatement. Alvarez learned how to position himself at the heart of the 20th century. He helped develop radar during World War II. He worked on the creation of the atomic bomb with Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer. He flew behind the Enola Gay as a scientific observer while it dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan. In fact, Alvarez's bubble chamber, the project that would earn him a Nobel, may have been his least publicized work: a pressurized chamber to help scientists study particle behavior. It was groundbreaking, though not as thrilling as proving — using a bunch of watermelons and a high-powered rifle — why the Warren Commission was probably correct about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In Alvarez's last decades, as if knocking out a little extra credit, he even gave us the answer to a mystery we all know the answer to now: He explained how a planet ruled by dinosaurs could go extinct nearly overnight. But … he was also something of a bootlicker. 'Alvarez knew how to cleave to power,' Nevala-Lee said. 'In a way I find interesting. The contrast to Oppenheimer is real, because Oppenheimer, equally brilliant, spoke his truth as he saw it.' He came to regret his role in creating nuclear weapons, so at the peak of McCarthy-era paranoia, his loyalty to the government was doubted and the head of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory had his security clearance revoked. Alvarez, meanwhile, 'was very careful about alienating people he needed to get stuff done,' Nevala-Lee said. 'In fact, and this is important, he doubled down and felt the solution to the Soviet problem was definitely a thermonuclear bomb. Alvarez would even become one of those people who was all for mutual assured destruction. Oppenheimer was not. Alvarez had such a high opinion of his own intelligence that when he sees someone equally bright, like Oppenheimer, opposing him on a fundamental point, he assumed it couldn't be he's wrong — no, Oppenheimer must be compromised. I don't know if he really believed that for sure, but I think so: Alvarez saw it to his advantage if Oppenheimer could be neutralized. He was causing problems, and Alvarez's work would go smoother if he was out of the way.' In the end, ever an opportunist, Alvarez testified Oppenheimer was loyal to his country, yet wrong on nukes. Not the profile in courage that makes for Oscar biopics. (Indeed, in Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer,' Alvarez is mostly on hand to say Germans just split the atom. Then he's gone from the picture. Alvarez, whose career was just getting started in 1939, wouldn't have been pleased.) To make matters worse, egads — Alvarez didn't seem to be a big fan of Chicago. Scientist Luis Walter Alvarez with a radio transmitter used in a radar ground-controlled approach system built to help guide airplanes to land. (AP) His ex-wife lived here with his ex-mother-in-law. During the development of the bomb, while traveling constantly between MIT and Los Alamos, he would call Chicago his 'decompression chamber,' but after working for a while at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, he felt rudderless and assumed all of the interesting science was being done elsewhere. He became something of a legend around Hyde Park — 'high on my list of mythological figures,' is how one scientist at University of Chicago described him — but Alvarez himself complained bitterly of his undergraduate education at the school, a place where, he said: 'Most of the graduate students didn't understand any quantum mechanics, largely for the reason that the professors had just learned it themselves.' He sounds, in many ways, I told Nevala-Lee, like the archetypal UC student. How so, he asked. Arrogant, awkward, questioning yet has all the answers; inquisitive yet careerist. 'I mean, that describes Alvarez,' Nevala-Lee said. 'I think of him now as someone who understood how to get things done. But he was abrasive, didn't treat subordinates well — it was a problem. He would have gotten more accomplished if people didn't feel personally attacked by him so much. He assumed if you were in physics at his level, you get this treatment. Can't take it, find another field.' Tack on a whimsical side — a study of UFOs, a study of pyramids, a genuine love for the science of the Superball by Wham-O — and Alvarez even sounds like a descendant of, well, Elon Musk. Nevala-Lee can see it. He was once enthralled himself by 'the American idea of visionary genius.' Nevala-Lee is 45 now, though younger, 'I had an exaggerated sense of my own abilities. I thought of myself as someone who could enter the world and solve its problems myself. Elon Musk was that guy about 10 years ago. I've since become pretty skeptical of this idea of a visionary genius. I don't know now if they ever did exist. Deep down, our figures like this, they all have the same problems.' By the way, since you're probably wondering, for the record, Nevala-Lee is a nice guy. cborrelli@
Chicago Tribune
2 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
Chicago Humanities Fall Festival faces the decline of the humanities with lineup including Margaret Atwood, Kate McKinnon
The Chicago Humanities Festival began in 1989. As the longtime nonprofit arts and culture organization announces its signature fall schedule this week, let us pause a moment and consider what a difference 36 years makes. That year, 1989 — not insignificant in the history of free expression in the United States — was the thick of the late 20th century 'culture wars.' Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center were entrenched. Robert Mapplethorpe (who died that March) and other transgressive artists provoked front-page outrage. Jesse Helms argued for 'family values' even as he sought to deny AIDS funding. The Supreme Court decided whether it was OK to burn American flags. The Moral Majority disbanded that year, but not before setting a table that led to budget cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts. You probably don't remember this part, those days long since obscured by much uglier times, but, in the end, only $45,000 of the NEA's $171 million proposed budget was cut. Three and a half decades later, the Chicago Humanities Festival faces a country in which universities, nevermind bureaucrats, want to demolish humanities curricula, and where many cultural institutions face a bleak future of almost zero public funding and the White House itself has made clear its intentions to eliminate the NEA altogether. How does an organization with 'humanities' right there in its name respond? By scheduling weeks of talks, readings and performances in the heart of some of the most impacted local communities. The day ends at Rockefeller Chapel with Nick Offerman, actor and Minooka native, on woodworking — but expect the never-politically-shy Offerman to weigh in on what ails us. On Sept. 21, the festival hosts a 'Pilsen/Little Village Day' throughout two of the Chicago neighborhoods most impacted by ICE raids. That day includes a chat with chef Rick Bayless and Jesse Valenciana, the Chicago-raised chef and journalist whose work focuses on Mexican cuisine. Also that afternoon, Cheech Marin (of Cheech & Chong) on Chicano art (and his California museum of art); and a conversation about Teen Angels magazine, the beloved (now defunct) zine often credited with spreading the culture of lowriders, tattoos and Latino aesthetics. On Oct. 13, the Morton Arboretum, to celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day, hosts Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Potawatomi member and famed botanist whose 'Braiding Sweetgrass,' a book of meditations on the environment, became an unlikely blockbuster. As for old-school activism: On Oct. 4, tucked into a lengthy day of events on the Bronzeville campus of Illinois Institute of Technology, there's Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble playing a composition for the famed intellectual and activist Angela Davis, followed by a chat with Davis. 'People can frame this (festival) however they want, I guess,' said Phillip Bahar, executive director of the Humanities Festival, 'but I don't think of what we do as go-march-in-the-street activism but closer to 'Here are a bunch of ideas relevant in our society and might be personally relevant within your family or community…' And so some of those events become political by chance. But we do focus on topics specific to the moment, and we do care about a diversity of ideas and those who shape ideas — left, right, female, male, any combination you can think. If we're trying to do a festival in Chicago that shows what the world is now, we have to reflect and show different sides.' Not that any of this means a lack of marquee names. Kate McKinnon returns to the festival; as does controversial statistician Nate Silver (both Oct. 4). Salman Rushdie — on a creative streak since recovering from his stabbing in 2022 — appears at the Athenaeum Center on Nov. 13. Margaret Atwood — whose speculative fiction gets less speculative by the day — appears Nov. 8. Roxane Gay talks about the 10th anniversary of her contemporary classic 'Bad Feminist' on Oct. 18; same day, Stephen Dubner talks about the 20th anniversary of 'Freakonomics.' As for local flavor, among other events, there's a conversation on architecture and society with the Floating Museum art collective (Oct. 4); walking tours of Bronzeville (Oct. 4) with Sherman 'Dilla' Thomas; the Lyric Opera performing 'Medea' (Oct. 18); and an afternoon festival in North Lawndale (Oct. 12) devoted to the design of sukkah, the temporary pavilions and structures created for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. For decades, the festival's fall schedule was a beast, held largely across downtown venues and far too vast to expect anyone to catch even a modest number of offerings. Now it's a touch smaller. These days, Bahar said, their events — 80 to 100 a year — are divided almost equally between fall and spring schedules. He also noted that the kind of philanthropic funding that cultural organizations like his once relied on has been shifting away from the arts. Plus, after the pandemic, audiences just don't leave home as often. 'Now we feel like the right size,' he said. Staying relevant could be the easy part. There was a time, not long ago, when Harvard's Jill Lepore on the U.S. Constitution (Nov. 5) and Stephanie Burt on Taylor Swift (Oct. 18) and Padma Lakshmi on the food of American immigrant communities (Nov. 11) would be mostly about what it sounded like they are about. On Oct. 15, Cory Doctorow and Kara Swisher talk about the decline of almost everything. The air, in 2025, is too charged to take events like that at face value anymore. 'Novelist Gary Shteyngart (Oct. 18) just wrote a book about a family that's trying to stay together while everything around them is coming apart,' Bahar said. 'And look, I mean, I have no idea — no idea whatsoever — where he possibly got that idea from!'
New York Post
4 days ago
- New York Post
DSA leaders tapping into Mandani's popularity to push ‘abolition' of traditional family
Zohran Mamdani's twisted comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America pushed for the 'abolition' of the traditional family at their annual conference, called marriage and sex work 'two sides of the same coin' and proclaimed abortions should be done in churches. Panelists at the 'Socialism 2025' conference last month in Chicago did victory laps over Mamdani's June win in the Democratic primary for NYC mayor, repeatedly touting his lefty agenda over the four-day commie-fest, video of the event shows. Speakers at 'The Left and the Family' seminar ignored the Uganda-born Mamdani's ultra-privileged upbringing by his Hollywood-director mom and radical Columbia University dad, all while parroting central tenets of Marxist ideology to the audience — that the nuclear family is inherently repressive, racist, sexist and promotes capitalism. Advertisement 'In addition to the abolition of family policing [government-run child protective services], we argue for abolition of the family in general and say that the institution of the family acts as part of the carceral system in that it reinforces children as property,' said panelist Olivia Katbi, co-chair of the DSA in Portland, Ore. 5 Zohran Mamdani's comrades rallied for an end of the traditional family at an annual conference — with twisted members of the Democratic Socialists of America calling marriage and sex work 'two sides of the same coin.' William C Lopez/New York Post Eman Abdelhadi, another panelist who is also an assistant professor at University of Chicago's Department of Comparative Human Development, said many fellow lefties are 'surprised at how few people are ready for revolt.' Advertisement 5 (Left to Right) Eman Abdelhadi, a University of Chicago assistant professor; Brooklyn writer Emily Janakiram; and Portland DSA co-chair Olivia Katbi speaking at the 'Socialism 2025' conference in Chicago last month. Democratic Socialists of America 'When we talk about family abolition…we're talking about the abolition of the economic unit,' she said. 'It is a horizon … in which all of our material needs are taken care of by the collective.' Abbelhadi is also the co-author of a 2022 fictional book 'Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072' that offers a utopian vision of a future Big Apple thriving on socialism following the collapse of capitalism in the 2050s. 5 NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mandami (center) celebrates winning Democratic primary in June with (left to right0 mother Mira Nair, wife Rama Duwaji and father Mahmood Mamdani. Getty Images Advertisement Emily Janakiram, a Brooklyn-based writer and organizer for New York City for Abortion Rights, spent much of her time on the panel ripping the sanctity of marriage – a bedrock Marxist belief — while failing to mention Mamdani, 33, recently celebrated his wedding to artist Rama Duwaii, 27, with a lavish, three-day affair at his family's ritzy, secluded Ugandan compound. 'The only real difference between marriage and prostitution is the price and the duration of the contract,' barked Janakiram, who admitted once marrying to score a woman a green card. 'Sex work and marriage can't exist without each other — they're two sides of the same coin,' she claimed. 5 Portland DSA co-chair Olivia Katbi and Katie Gibson, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, speaking at 'Socialism 2025' conference. Democratic Socialists of America Advertisement The panel — all of whom wore COVID masks and practicing social distancing — included Katie Gibson, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. The group took questions from the audience, including one man who bizarrely boasted he wanted to perform abortions in the House of God. 'I'm also a Baptist minister, and on that revolutionary horizon, I want to perform abortions at a church before it's all said and done,' said the man, who identified himself as a DSA member from Austin, TX, named 'Steve.' Members of the panel nodded their heads in agreement as he spoke. 5 Members of the Uganda Special Forces Command monitor gate movement at the Mamdani family home in Buziga on July 24 during a gala bash celebrating Zohran Mamdani's February marriage to Rama Duwaii. The elite unit is routinely tasked with conducting high-stakes missions — not offering security for parties. New York Post Stu Smith, an investigative analyst with the Manhattan Institute, said Mamdani's Democratic primary win had DSA members feeling so cocky at the conference that many think they can 'burn the whole house down.' 'I think they're drunk on the aspect that they might actually get to be in power of the greatest city on earth,' he told The Post. 'They think they've already won, and they're completely willing to say whatever they want to say now. I think a lot of them are emboldened.' Smith also said the DSA's anti-family message at the conference runs counter to Mamdani's lavish lifestyle. Advertisement 'He's a nepo baby from a traditional family — but then he wants to distribute the wealth while also just having a luxury wedding,' said Smith, who shared video of the seminar on X. 'It's just another example of him being a massive hypocrite. Mamdani's campaign did not return messages. Councilman Robert Holden, a moderate Queens Democrat, said the panelists' remarks should serve as a warning to all NYC residents of the threat Mamdani poses to traditional American values. 'Zohran Mamdani and his allies in the DSA are openly laying out their radical 'Project DSA 2026' agenda for state-run families, indoctrinating our children, and dismantling the very fabric of our society,' he said. 'This is exactly why we must defeat Mamdani and ensure he never gets anywhere near Gracie Mansion or City Hall.'
