Julia Keller

To help you sort through the more than 140 offerings of the Chicago Humanities Festival, our critics offer a few suggestions. See the listings for the complete descriptions of the...

Diane Beedle, 30, is in her fifth year of graduate work at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a doctoral student in the department of education. Born in...

The kid was standing on the corner, hands jammed in his pockets, scowl crouched in his face. He looked to be 15, maybe 16. His skin radiated a sort of...

I have this thing about museums. No matter how delectable and inspiring the contents, museums make me itch and squirm like a tomboy in a tutu. (Having actually been a...

Were I to be deputized briefly by some august rules-making body, my first act might very well be to banish wryness from all cultural reportage. At one stroke, I would...

Curse you, Michael Crichton. And you, too, Steven Spielberg. Because of you guys, one's first sight of Sue at the Field Museum can't help but be just a shade anticlimactic....

The neighborhood's name is irrelevant because you already know the kind of place I mean: block after block of bleakness, of burned-out storefronts, of crumbling houses, of garbage-clotted vacant lots,...

When David Letterman packed up his late-night talk show in a little red bandana tied on a stick and moved from NBC to CBS in 1993, he included in his...

Just because a book is lewd, shallow, trashy, tasteless, exploitative and badly written doesn't mean it's unimportant. On the contrary: "American Rhapsody," the new book by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas that...

We would sit at the kitchen table for hours, my father and I, while he tried his best to introduce the principles of calculus to my stoutly resistant brain. He...