Welcome, Mother Jones Drum Beat readers, to the online home of the Chicago Humanities Festival! At CHF, we create opportunities for people of all ages to support, enjoy, and explore the humanities. As part of this mission, we make talks, ideas, and presentations available as audio and video right here on our web site. We have more than 200 pieces of content available for you to stream for free, right now, representing the best and brightest our festivals have had to offer for over 20 years.
Drum Beat covers health care, corporate bailouts, politics, and more. For your first visit to our site, we’ve assembled a formidable array of the drums beaten here at CHF. These voices are a who’s who of advocates, thought leaders, advisors, and influential leaders. We’ve admired the way they have outlined some of our thorniest problems and, in some cases, proposed solutions to which we can all contribute.
Top 6 CHF Talks for Drum Beat readers:
- Special Advisor to the Treasury Elizabeth Warren on her personal and intellectual journey and its culmination in the building of an agency. Her appearance at CHF on February 23 was one of only a handful she has given since her appointment last September.
- Economist and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich speaks about the economic meltdown of 2008, its effect on our economy, and how Americans can climb out of tough times
- Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch since 1993, takes on torture and pulls no punches in his analysis of the use of torture by the United States
- Author, consultant, and professor Richard Florida on his thesis that economic growth is directly influenced by human creativity
- Senator Claire McCaskill, the first woman elected to the Senate from Missouri, shares her perspective on public service, policies, and progress forward
- Newly-appointed president of Grinnell College and former deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, Raynard Kington discusses socioeconomic disparities and the struggle to address the changing health patterns of our society
This six-item list only scratches the surface of our public affairs content. We encourage you to dive more deeply into our site, using the genre categories near the top of our site or the “similar features” recommendations on each piece of CHF content. We hope you find our CHF “drum beat” a riveting dissection of some of today’s most pressing issues.
