Author Archives: Mary Wisniewski

Over the two decades Lauren Deutsch has been photographing jazz musicians, she’s found that often her best pictures aren’t necessarily the sharpest or the most rigorously composed. She likes the ones that evoke the spirit of the music–sometimes through the demeanor of the musician and sometimes through the texture of the image. Deutsch, who’s executive […]

Explorer Mary Henrietta Kingsley fit into late-19th-century British society about as comfortably as Tarzan. While other Victorian ladies were practicing needlework and having babies, Kingsley was wading through the malarial swamps of West Africa, climbing Mount Cameroon, studying the Fang people, a tribe with a reputation for cannibalism, and collecting fish and beetle specimens for […]

Try this one out at the office. A panhandler approaches a man on the street outside a theater. The man declines to give anything, saying, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be–William Shakespeare.” The panhandler replies, “Fuck you!–David Mamet.” Is this a funny joke? That depends on several variables, according to University of Chicago professor […]

“We never really see ourselves–we see ourselves reflected in other people’s eyes, in the mirror, in popular culture, in people’s expectations, and in our own expectations,” says Debra N. Mancoff, explaining the idea behind “Reflections,” an exhibit at Woman Made Gallery that opens this weekend. Mancoff, an art historian and scholar in residence at the […]

Not long ago, Sam Sanfillippo, a longtime member of the Lions Club, saw an article in the club magazine about albino squirrels in Maryville, Missouri. He wrote to the head of the Maryville club. “I said, ‘If you don’t mind, if one of your albino squirrels gets a heart attack and dies or gets hit […]

You might imagine the director of an institution named the Chicago Christian Industrial League to be a grim, black-frocked fellow, passing out bowls of greasy soup. But the director of the Chicago Christian Industrial League at 123 S. Green St., a bright and homey place, is Rick Roberts, a genial, energetic young man who wears […]