The One Who Mumbles

Today is World Mental Health Day, an annual global event started in 1992 at the World Federation of Mental Health to promote awareness, educ...

I was hoping that Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 would be a breathless page-turner about the human dramas of con...

At first glance, James Ensor's 1891 Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring is perhaps a silly take on Halloween imagery. Or an homag...

Horizontal Tree Piet Mondrian 1912 A series of increasingly Cubist tree paintings marked Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s transition from repres...

There is a moment near the end of The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? —Edward Albee's 2002 tour-de-force play exploring the outer limits of love...

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter has developed a signature visual vocabulary of so...

24 years ago this morning I ran a little late and got caught in the rush-hour crowds that prevented me from getting a seat on my EL train. B...

Though a proud native son of Czechoslovakia, Dvořák is perhaps best known for his mighty, highly melodic Symphony No. 9, which is most commo...

On its surface, Slaughterhouse-Five (actual full name: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death ) is a p...

His Candide Overture is perhaps the singular most joyful piece of brilliantly scattered, wickedly intractable music ever written, with its c...

Five years ago today, a massive derecho—a Category 4 inland hurricane defined by its straight-line winds, which exceeded 140 miles an hour h...

F. Scott Fitzgerald was arguably ahead of his time when he published his novel The Great Gatsby in 1925. America was still too deep in the ...

Maybe Happy Ending first appeared on my radar in a dismissive review that said it’s about two robots who go on a road trip to see fireflies...

For some reason I’ve never seen the Death Becomes Her movie. I’ve seen enough clips of it that I’ve gotten the general gist, but they clear...

I can’t remember if I’ve ever read or seen The Outsiders (a 1967 novel adapted into a movie in 1983), but the plot seemed vaguely familiar ...

I want to be Cole Escola’s best friend.   They—meaning Cole—wrote Oh, Mary! in response to the idea that maybe Lincoln’s assassination wasn...

A one-woman play about a battered wife in rural Louisiana who escapes her trauma by writing poetry, Call Me Izzy doesn’t give itself much r...

We’re proud because despite decades and decades of relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and c...

I didn’t really know anybody by the time the first pride parade happened soon after I moved to Chicago. So I went by myself to watch it. And...

Fifty-six years ago today, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn—a mob-controlled gay bar in Greenwich Village that catered most...