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The city’s annual literary festival continues through October 30, with readings and book signings by local and national writers, poets, and scholars as well as discussions, lectures, workshops, and children’s activities at bookstores, public libraries, and other venues. All are free unless otherwise noted. For more information call 312-747-4300, see www.chicagopubliclibrary.org, or contact the hosting venues. SATURDAY 9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Meeting the Muse” Writing workshop with poet Cynthia Gallaher....

“In a little over 15 years, the Chicago school system has gone from ‘districts,’ to ‘service centers,’ to ‘regions,’ to ‘Area Instructional Offices,’” notes an emphatically unimpressed writer in Substance (September). “The new plan seems to have the six high school areas running from the east to west. The geographical boundaries of the new elementary areas are difficult to determine from the confusing maps distributed by the school board’s Office of Communications at the end of August....

This fact-based but speculative drama by British playwright Michael Frayn focuses on two Nobel-winning atomic physicists, Denmark’s Niels Bohr and Germany’s Werner Heisenberg–longtime friends who found themselves on opposite sides during World War II. The subject is their falling-out after a mysterious meeting in 1941, when Heisenberg questioned Bohr on the feasibility and morality of atomic-weapons research. Copenhagen explores multiple interpretations of that history-making, much debated incident: was Heisenberg trying to trick Bohr into sharing nuclear secrets or strike a deal ensuring that neither side would develop an atom bomb?...

This is radically different from Olivier Assayas’s two previous features (Late August, Early September and Les destinees), but it suggests a continuation of his Irma Vep (1996) in its narrative ambiguity and its feeling for contemporary conspiracy. The main difference is that Assayas seems more deliberate now in tapping his unconscious, making the aura of mystery somewhat more willful. This begins as a sleek paranoid thriller about a multinational conglomerate, dominated by women (Connie Nielsen, Chloe Sevigny, Gina Gershon), that traffics in 3-D manga porn, and though the backdrop shifts from Tokyo to Paris to rural Texas, the film ultimately slides into a netherworld where it’s impossible to distinguish fact from fantasy....

Unknown Maker: The Art of the American Daguerreotype Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The daguerreotype, invented by Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, debuted in 1839 and by the mid-1840s was widely used commercially, particularly in the United States. The process itself sounds distinctly alchemical: a copper plate is coated with a layer of light-sensitive silver, which is then exposed and developed with the fumes of heated mercury and toned with a solution of gold chloride (shuddering OSHA officials come to mind)....

We are so fucked. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both the realities and the possibilities are astonishing. Not to say traumatic. Not to say apocalyptic. The successful mapping of the human genetic code together with other breakthroughs like cloning pretty much mean the end of life as we know it–and ourselves as we know us. Indeed, as “Gene(sis)” strongly suggests, the threshold of transformation has already been crossed....

When Sean Kelly opened his new store, Videogames Etc, this past June he kept the fanfare to a minimum. “Video game collectors can be a pretty critical lot, so I avoided doing the grand opening thing,” he says. “I just wanted to get it up and quietly running, then give myself some time to get the details right.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Until he sold his franchise last January, Kelly was well on his way to becoming a lifer with White Hen....

Wire Almost since their inception Wire have been exceptionally fond of projects, processes, and predetermined restrictions–built-ins to prevent them from repeating themselves. Every so often, as a matter of course, the members pause and rethink their basic approach to playing together, and if they can’t find a satisfactory new solution, they quit. The three studio albums they made in the late 70s are dramatically different from one another, and though they would scoop up songs left over from one to carry forward to the next, they almost always recast them to fit the revised style....

The 23 paintings in M. Ivan Cherry’s new show at Gescheidle form a meditation on sleeping children that’s more proof of the relevance of figurative painting. Quick and Nimble is an overhead view of a shirtless boy lost in sleep. Like all of Cherry’s figures he’s isolated on a canvas painted a solid color, which pushes viewers to focus on the boy’s unblemished skin and relaxed body–the encapsulation of innocence. In Devotion the right hand of a sleeping girl in diapers covers her heart, the left grasps a delicate white feather–a reminder of how simple commitment can be....

Lead Stories In April the official newspaper of the People’s Republic of China reported that a company in Nanchang had illegally harvested the kidneys of convicted killer Fu Xinrong after his execution….Last month a man walked into a Porsche dealership in Palo Alto, California, and convinced an employee that he was the owner of the $125,000 Turbo 996 that was scheduled to be picked up 20 minutes later….And in July two men in Corpus Christi, Texas, pleaded guilty to hunting coyotes on federal land by baiting fishing poles with deer meat and reeling in the coyotes....

“We are not robots,” Satko Ibrahimovic says. “We are humans. We have to be different, and to find beauty in the difference between us.” He was vacationing in Greece when the Bosnian war erupted; he first saw his hometown under attack by Serb forces on TV. He spent days in his hotel room, glued to the set, exchanging phone calls with his parents in Banja Luka. They were Bosnian Muslims, and when the campaign of ethnic cleansing began, there was no way he could safely go back....

Reporter’s Privilege in Peril Before McKevitt v. Pallasch, the case Posner weighed in on, “I would have had two additional arguments,” says Andich. And those would have been arguments that reporters have long considered fundamental–that Conroy’s documents were protected by a federal common law privilege and by a federal First Amendment privilege. McKevitt arguably overrules that entire body of law. In federal magistrate Geraldine Soat Brown, Andich faced a judge he sensed would listen with an open mind....

Robert Earl Keen first recorded his best-known tune in 1989: “The Road Goes on Forever,” an instant classic about drinking and drifting, was subsequently covered by Joe Ely, Jack Ingram, and the Highwaymen. Since then he’s been zigzagging across the country on one tour after another, cementing his rep as a brainy Texas troubadour and an alt-country patriarch. He’s certainly earned the right to make a full album devoted to being nomadic (though the new Gravitational Forces, on Lost Highway, includes his third recording of “The Road Goes on Forever,” in case anyone missed it before)....

Every fall countless thousands of migrating sandhill cranes gather at the Jasper-Pulaski Fish and Wildlife Area in northwest Indiana. The crane has a coltish grace, standing four feet tall on spindly legs that at takeoff bounce in backbeat to the flap of the wings and before landing splay apart, slowing the 12-pound bird for a bouncy touchdown. Feeding in a marshy meadow, it struts with slow, angular precision, its plumage plain pale gray to brown except on the forehead, where the feathers fall out at maturity to reveal a patch of scarlet....

George Savino was trying to teach Kinga Plonka to talk like an American. So he asked the Polish bookkeeper to read aloud from a Reader article about Velveeta and pornography. “It’s not an important word, but you should say it right anyway. This is–what is this word?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Vel-vee-ta. Por-nog-ra-phy. Plonka must learn these words so she can achieve her ambition in this country: becoming a real estate agent....

John Malkovich makes his cinematic directorial debut with this fine political thriller about a police detective in an unnamed Latin American country who’s charged with tracking down the charismatic leader of a terrorist group (based on Abimael Guzman of the Shining Path in Peru) as the president prepares to declare martial law. Handsome Javier Bardem (Before Night Falls) gives a remarkably focused performance as the cop, who’s stuck in an unhappy marriage to a shallow middle-class woman, haunted by boyhood memories of the military seizing his father’s coffee farm, and tormented by a guilty passion for his young daughter’s earthy dance teacher (Italian actress Laura Morante)....

The Paper in Her Pocket As Loren-Maltese might have told the Institute for Latino Studies, read El Dia every week if you don’t think Cicero’s a wonderful town. No newspaper around has a sharper eye for the bright side. Even when Loren-Maltese and seven codefendants, most of them former town officials, were charged a year ago with racketeering, in an alleged scheme to siphon $10 million from the town’s insurance fund, El Dia’s spirits didn’t flag....

JANUARY Already beleaguered by the press for her performance during the presidential vote-counting scandal, heavily lacquered Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris gets it this month from Mr. Blackwell, who ranks her tenth on his annual list of the nation’s worst-dressed celebrities. “The pretty, brassy lassie from Tallahassee needs cosmetic direction,” proclaims Hollywood’s self-appointed fashion cop. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MARCH The U....

BIG JACK JOHNSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Big Jack Johnson may not be the kind of Delta bluesman to howl at the devil, but his brand of good-time music can be as serious as hellfire–with his bearlike stage presence and hoarse, raucous singing, the Mississippi-born guitarist does juke-party boogies with the urgency and commitment of a true believer. Johnson’s guitar tone is brilliant and metallic, and he punctuates his leads with wide-open chords, often fretted high to give them extra bite....

Lynn Geesaman River North is positively abloom: there are flower paintings at three galleries, and flowers are prominent at two more. As any Redon lover knows, flower paintings can be gloriously intense, but those at Belloc Lowndes and Sonia Zaks don’t seem to go much beyond pretty colors, producing the most superficial of responses and eschewing real beauty. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The light colors and airy spaces of Monticiano, Italy, 2000 recall impressionist paintings (which Geesaman loved at the Cleveland Museum of Art as a child)....