For City Colleges grads it was ‘never too late’ to get their high school degree

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Read an Excerpt from “Metropolitan Latinidad,” Edited by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz

March 25, 2025

Latino urban history has been underappreciated not only in its own right but for the centrality of its narratives to urban history as a field. A scholarly discipline that has long scrutinized economics, politics, and the built environment has too often framed race as literally Black and white. This has

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Read an Interview with Poet and Translator Kristin Dykstra

March 24, 2025

As we get ready to celebrate Poetry Month 2025, we also continue to celebrate the amazing writers, editors, and translators in our Phoenix Poets series. Here, we spoke with poet and translator Kristin Dykstra, whose new book of original poems, Dissonance, considers life at the US’s northern border in the

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Read an Excerpt from “The Sad Citizen: How Politics Is Depressing and Why It Matters”

March 20, 2025

From rising polarization to climate change, today’s politics are leaving many Western democracies in the throes of malaise. In The Sad Citizen, Christopher Ojeda draws on wide-ranging data from the United States and beyond to explain how politics is depressing, why this matters, and what we can do about it.

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A Jazz Age Lesson in Activism, with Stunning Parallels to Politics Today

March 18, 2025

Guest Post from Gioia Diliberto, author of Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition A radical social/political movement has taken over the government. Privately, many legislators and officials acknowledge that the movement is deeply flawed, even mad in some respects. They know the country is

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A Guest Post from Margaret Gullette, author of “American Eldercide”

March 11, 2025

“The Room Next Door” is Stylish and Even Watchable . . . But Not Brave Enoughby Margaret Morganroth Gullette Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” enacts a rare life event that most of us don’t want to contemplate even vicariously. By now everyone knows the donnée: A war correspondent (Tilda Swinton),

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Chicago Perspectives on Current Events: A Reading List for Understanding Our Political Moment

March 6, 2025

Does today’s political moment have you asking “How did we get here?” If so, we have a reading list that includes histories of American commerce and trade, culture wars, the American Supreme Court, European capitalism, and the hunt for Nazis who escaped justice after World War II. Works by political

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Chicago Perspectives on Current Events: A Reading List of Books to Think With

February 27, 2025

In today’s never-ending news cycle, it can be hard to stay grounded and make sense of the flood of information. So, we offer here a list of books to help us think through these times. Informed by the University of Chicago’s trademark openness to the free exchange of ideas, the

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Read an Excerpt from “Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals since the 1960s”

February 27, 2025

Since the 1960s, American liberalism and the Democratic Party have been remade along professional class lines, widening liberalism’s impact but narrowing its social and political vision. In Mastery and Drift, historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have assembled a group of scholars to address the formation of “professional-class liberalism” and its

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Five Questions with Jill Pruetz, author of “Apes on the Edge”

February 20, 2025

Fongoli chimpanzees are unique for many reasons. Their female hunters are the only apes that regularly hunt with tools, seeking out tiny bush babies with wooden spears. Unlike most other chimps, these apes fear neither water nor fire, using shallow pools to cool off in the Senegalese heat. Up to

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It’s graduation season in Chicago. Over the weekend, families and friends gathered at Malcolm X College on the Near West Side to celebrate a set of unconventional high school grads. Host: Mary Dixon; Reporter: Tessa Weinberg