Welcome, Mother Jones Drum Beat, to 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.
For your 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. If you like what you hear, sign up for our email list and we'll send you similar multimedia content about once a week.
Top Talks for Drum Beat Readers:
- Above: newly-minted Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren on her personal and intellectual journey and its culmination in the building of an agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Her appearance at CHF was one of only a handful she gave before announcing her candidacy for the Senate.
- 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.
- Distinguished law scholar Martha Nussbaum considers LGBT relationships as she delivers a riveting overview of her book, From Disgust to Humanity.
- Sherwin Nuland discusses the history of medical ethics from Hippocrates to the present, including his vision for healthcare reform.
If you like what you've seen here—or even better, if you don't—let us know what you think! Leave a comment on the right or on any of the pages listed above.
