WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

David Misch discusses his new book Funny: The Book — Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Comedy. From ancient Tricksters to Modern Family, Mr. Misch looks at what comedy is, where it comes from and where it's going (oddly enough, Philadelphia).

As part of the programming for the 2013-14 One Book, One Chicago selection, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story Of America’s Great Migration, the Chicago Public Library welcomed Timuel D. Black Jr., Linda Johnson Rice and Adam Green for an engaging conversation of how the Great Migration shaped their lives and the city of Chicago. 

 This group reading at the Chicago Public Library offers a sampling of the diversity of women’s voices, topics and writing styles that can be heard at the Woman Made Gallery. Featured poets include Yolanda Nieves, Robin Fine, Kelly Norman Ellis and curator Nina Corwin.

Sapphire does not shy away from difficult subjects. In The Kid, the sequel to her 1996 novel Push, she again takes up the topic of childhood sexual abuse, and what happens when institutions that are supposed to protect children fail to do so. 

Michael Hainey, Chicago native and deputy editor at GQ appears in conversation with Bill Savage of Northwestern University. In his gripping memoir After Visiting Friends, Hainey sets out to answer questions about his father’s death at age 35.

Chicago writer, Gillian Flynn, discusses her new book Gone Girl, a best seller on The New York Times best seller fiction list.

From one of our finest and most popular science writers comes the answer to a scientific mystery as big as the world itself: How are the events that formed our solar system billions of years ago embedded inside each of us? Neil Shubin takes an expansive approach to the question of why we look the way we do.