Friday 10/24 – Thursday 10/30
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Next year’s presidential election and the 20th anniversary of the election of Chicago’s first African-American mayor are the springboards for an exploration of the current racial and political climate at this weekend’s two-day symposium, Harold Washington: His Legacy, Our Future. Today’s speakers include Source editor-at-large Akiba Solomon, Pulitzer-winning journalist Leon Dash, U.S. congressman John Conyers, DePaul political scientist Maria de los Angeles Torres, and In These Times publisher Jeff Epton (the son of Washington’s Republican opponent, Bernard Epton). The symposium runs tonight from 5:30 to 8 at the Chicago Historical Society, 1601 N. Clark, and tomorrow from 8:30 to 3 at the University of Chicago’s International House, 1414 E. 59th. It’s free; call 773-702-8063 or see www.ihouse.uchicago.edu for more.
Anish Kapoor’s $3 million, 100-ton polished-steel bubble will be the London-based sculptor’s first U.S. installation and a focal point of Millennium Park when it’s finally unveiled next spring. You can catch a glimpse of his work on a smaller scale at tonight’s performance of Kaash by London’s Akram Khan Company. The first-time collaboration, which combines traditional kathakali and contemporary dance, features a set by Kapoor and music by award-winning multi-instrumentalist Nitin Sawhney. It’ll be performed tonight and tomorrow, October 25, at 7:30 and Sunday, October 26, at 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. Tickets are $22; call 312-397-4010 or see the Critic’s Choice in Dance for more.
27 MONDAY “I remember reading an article, I must have been eight or nine, about the discovery of the positive electron–the positron,” Nobel laureate Leon Lederman told an interviewer in 1992. “It was a front-page article in the New York Times describing this very romantic discovery and I just thought that was terrific.” Now the high-energy physicist sits on the science advisory board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing; today at 4 he’ll moderate a free panel called Is Science Writing Coming of Age? Guests include reporter and journalism professor Deborah Blum, who won a 1992 Pulitzer for “The Monkey Wars,” her Sacramento Bee series on primate research, and best-selling author Timothy Ferris, whom the Christian Science Monitor has dubbed “the best popular science writer in the English language today.” Part of the Medill School of Journalism’s Crain Lecture Series, it takes place at Northwestern University’s McCormick Tribune Center, 1870 Campus Dr. in Evanston; call 847-491-5401 for more information.
