Welcome, Mother Jones DC Decoder readers, to the Chicago Humanities Festival!
For your visit, our staff has picked top CHF talks for readers of DC Decoder:
Top 6 CHF Talks for DC Decoder Readers
- (Embedded Above) Former Special Advisor to the Treasury Elizabeth Warren talks about her personal and intellectual journey and its culmination in the building of an agency. Her appearance at CHF on February 23, 2011 was one of only a handful she has given since her appointment last September. Warren is in the news lately as she prepares a 2012 Senate run from Massachusetts.
- Sherwin Nuland discusses the history of medical ethics from Hippocrates to the present, including his vision for healthcare reform.
- Geoffrey Stone, a professor at The University of Chicago Law School and a foremost authority on the First Amendment, discusses Perilous Times, his history of actions by the United States government that have had the potential to endanger fundamental rights during wartime.
- Geoffrey Stone anchors a panel on the history of obscenity and the reasons for its regulation as well as contemporary issues ranging from child pornography to “sexting” and other expressions of sexuality in youth culture.
- Geoffrey Stone leads a distinguished panel of jurists and scholars on the comedians and cases that tested the limits of the First Amendment, including Lenny Bruce's obscenity conviction, the Supreme Court decisions involving George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" and the dispute between Jerry Falwell and Hustler magazine over the outer bounds of permissible parody.
- Cultural critic Laura Kipnis dissects why people feel compelled to act out their tangled psychodramas on the national stage (politicians' affairs, especially!), and why we so enjoy watching them, hurling our condemnations while savoring—and sharing—every lurid detail.
This list only scratches the surface. We encourage you to dive more deeply into our site. You can browse the categories listed across the top of our site, or you can follow the “similar programs” recommendations on each of our CHF talk pages.
At CHF, we create opportunities for people of all ages to enjoy and explore the humanities. As part of this mission, we make talks, ideas, and presentations available as audio and video on our web site. We have more than 200 talks available for you to stream for free, right now, representing the best and brightest our festivals have had to offer for over 20 years.
