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A series of interviews with artists, authors, architects, and others representing Chicago’s diverse creative community, presented by the Chicago Humanities Festival, in partnership with EXPO CHICAGO, Navy Pier, and Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art exploring Chicago’s art and design legacy, with presenting partner, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
What do artist Theaster Gates, architect Jeanne Gang, and photographer Dawoud Bey have in common?
They’re all contributing to Chicago’s ever-evolving creative culture—and will be sitting down with Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London and one of the world's leading art curators and critics, known for his long-form, dynamic interview marathons. Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon is Obrist’s first U.S. marathon, and takes a multi-dimensional, multidisciplinary look at creativity in the city, past, present and future.
Through a wide-ranging dialogue with over 20 Chicago-based creatives, Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon examined the forces that have made and continue to make Chicago a creative powerhouse.
Funding for Creative Chicago was provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation with additional support from Elizabeth A. Liebman, Herman Miller, and the WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive.
The event, featuring 20 artists, architects, authors, and representatives from the city, took place on Sept. 29, 2018 at Navy Pier. PEN America and the Strand present a retrospective of 2018 through the eyes of some of our most talented authors. Panelists, from left to right: moderator Rakesh Satyal, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Wayétu Moore, and Amitava Kumar.
Amitava Kumar’s “Immigrant, Montana” blends the traditional coming of age novel with the story of an Indian immigrant coming to America, in a book that was referred to as “bio-fiction.” Wayetú Moore’s “She Would Be King” weaves together the historical facts of the founding of Liberia with magical realism, bringing together characters from all corners of the African diaspora. Together, these authors will speak about their work, this year’s news cycles, and what it means to work as a writer in an era of “fake news” and “alternative facts.” 
Mark Eisner presents "Neruda: The Poet's Calling," Kay Redfield Jamison presents "Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania and Character" and Fiona Sampson presents "In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein" at the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
Speaker Biography: Mark Eisner has spent most of the past two decades on projects related the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1971. Eisner's recent work is "Neruda: The Poet's Calling" (Ecco). Library Journal called the book "a definitive biography." In addition to writing about Neruda, Eisner has translated many of his poems, including ones for "The Essential Neruda." In association with Latino Public Broadcasting, Eisner is working on a documentary of the poet's life.
Speaker Biography: Kay Redfield Jamison is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as an honorary professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the author of the national best-sellers "An Unquiet Mind," "Night Falls Fast" and "Touched with Fire," and is the co-author of the standard medical text on bipolar disorder, "Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression." Her new book is "Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character" (Vintage). Dr. Jamison is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and is a recipient of the Lewis Thomas Prize, the Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health from the National Academy of Medicine, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But according to renowned historian and best-selling author Jill Lepore, it rests, too, on “a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching.” Witty, endlessly curious, and astonishingly lucid, Lepore returns to CHF with “the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades." American cultural historian Eric Slauter joins Lepore for a conversation focused on her groundbreaking investigation of an American past that claims to have placed truth itself at the center of the nation’s history—and asks whether the actual course of events has supported this claim or, in fact, belied it. 
Adam Tooze, Quinn Slobodian, and Atossa Araxia Abrahamian discuss neoliberalism, globalization, and the future of democracy.
At Verso Books in Brooklyn, September 20, 2018.
Ten years after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers nearly shattered the global economy, basic questions about the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression remain unanswered. What drove the accumulation of private debt and financialization of the economy that made the downturn possible? Was this a crisis for neoliberalism? Given its association with globalization, is a defense of national sovereignty the only way to take back democratic control from neoliberal forces? How has this shaped the populist revolts now transforming the global order, and how might the left respond?
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Adam Tooze is Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University, where he also directs the European Institute. He is author of “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.”
Quinn Slobodian is associate professor of history at Wellesley College. His most recent book is “Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.” Forthcoming is “Nine Lives of Neoliberalism” (Verso Books), co-edited with Dieter Plehwe and Philip Mirowski. He is currently writing a book with the working title “Hayek’s Bastards” on the neoliberal roots of the far right.
The conversation is moderated by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, senior editor at the Nation and a contributing editor at Dissent. Bruce Schneier, the author of Click Here to Kill Everybody in conversation with Abby Everett Jaques, MIT.
From the description of "Click Here to Kill Everybody":
Computer security is no longer about data; it's about life and property. This change makes an enormous difference, and will shake up our industry in many ways. First, data authentication and integrity will become more important than confidentiality. And second, our largely regulation-free Internet will become a thing of the past. Soon we will no longer have a choice between government regulation and no government regulation. Our choice is between smart government regulation and stupid government regulation. Given this future, it's vital that we look back at what we've learned from past attempts to secure these systems, and forward at what technologies, laws, regulations, economic incentives, and social norms we need to secure them in the future. 
Eric Klinenberg is a professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Modern Romance and the author of the acclaimed books Going Solo and Heat Wave. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and This American Life. @EricKlinenberg.
Dorian T. Warren is President of the Center for Community Change Action and Vice-President of the Center for Community Change. He is also a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and Co-Chair of the Economic Security Project. He previously taught for over a decade at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. Warren also worked at MSNBC where he was a Contributor, fill-in host for Melissa Harris Perry and Now with Alex Wagner, and Host and Executive Producer of Nerding Out on MSNBC’s digital platform. He has also written for The Nation, Huffington Post, Newsweek, Salon, Washington Post, New York Times, Medium, Ebony, and Boston Review. Warren is co-author of The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy and co-editor of Race and American Political Development. In 2013, he was included on the list of NBC’s theGrio’s 100 people making history today.
In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, churches, synagogues, and parks where crucial, sometimes life-saving connections, are formed. These are places where people gather and linger, making friends across group lines and strengthening the entire community. Klinenberg calls this the “social infrastructure”: When it is strong, neighborhoods flourish; when it is neglected, as it has been in recent years, families and individuals must fend for themselves.
Klinenberg takes us around the globe—from a floating school in Bangladesh to an arts incubator in Chicago, from a soccer pitch in Queens to an evangelical church in Houston—to show how social infrastructure is helping to solve some of our most pressing challenges: isolation, crime, education, addiction, political polarization, and even climate change.
Richly reported, elegantly written, and ultimately uplifting, Palaces for the People urges us to acknowledge the crucial role these spaces play in civic life. Our social infrastructure could be the key to bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides—and safeguarding democracy. 
N. K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.
In these stories, Jemisin sharply examines modern society, infusing magic into the mundane, and drawing deft parallels in the fantasy realms of her imagination. Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.
N.K. Jemisin is joined in conversation by Makeba Lavan. Makeba is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she focuses on (African) American Studies, Afrofuturism and Popular Culture. She has taught writing and literature courses at Lehman College since 2014.
