Remember Steam Greenlight? It was a way for indie developers to get their games on Steam, based on community approval—this was all before Steam opened the floodgates and let most […]

When going to an exhibition that presents abstract art, two questions always come to mind: Can contemporary abstract art still create an element of surprise? And is it still a […]

Bella likes her solitude. It’s a familiar feeling for some of us, as the pandemic revealed true differences between introverts and extroverts. Veteran Chicago actor Mary Beth Fisher fully embodies […]

Way back when, when I was, I guess, a “cub” writer, I was unofficially assigned the “nerd beat.” This was in no small part due to the fact that my […]

The Chicago farmers market season opened on May 1—a delightful and welcome return to normalcy. And with this weekend’s opening days, almost every high-profile market—and many of the cozier neighborhood […]

The Djinn is the kind of movie that proves that big budgets and a marquee cast are sometimes just icing on the independent filmmaking cake and that a perfectly entertaining […]

It’s always disappointing when a film doesn’t live up to expectations; it’s exponentially worse when that film comes from a filmmaker who is clearly capable of great things on screen. […]

When COVID-19 closed taprooms and cancelled festivals, I looked for ways to still engage with Chicago’s craft beer scene. I therefore decided to finally work my way through The Complete Beer […]

My brain is still attempting to understand how Spiral is a Saw movie at all. Okay yes, it takes place in the same universe as the original Jigsaw killings. And […]

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 […]

For the Love of Cod: A Father and Son’s Search for Norwegian Happiness Eric Dregni University of Minnesota Press Eric Dregni is only partly Norwegian but that hasn’t stopped him […]

Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town By Jason Stacy University of Illinois Press It’s ironic that Spoon River Anthology—perhaps the most famous […]