Mind games

The Chicago Humanities Festival, now in its 16th year, is a sprawling smorgasbord of intellectual victuals—a chance to banter with deep thinkers and envelope-pushing artists from across the world. The 16-day multivenue event starts Saturday 29 and boasts an estimable lineup of intellectual heavy hitters and obscure but often more intriguing presenters. But buy your tickets soon: Several of the programs featuring celebs—writers Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Joan Didion, and artist Alex Katz—are sold out. As we went to press, Erica Jong had replaced Mia Farrow for a November 10 lecture on women and culture, so if you'd like Jong to sign your dog-eared copy of Fear of Flying, you may be in luck. Here are some other brainy events we're psyched about. (Look for more fest events in this issue's listings, or see www.chfestival.org for more information.)

Richard Florida
Nov 3, noon; First United Methodist Church, 77 W Washington St. $5. George Mason University professor Richard Florida made waves in 2002 with The Rise of the Creative Class, a book about how the increasing number of "creative" jobs is changing our economy. His follow-up, The Flight of the Creative Class, claims that the global competition for talent, fueled by workers willing to relocate anywhere, will be a dominant economic trend in the coming years.

Olivier Meslay
Nov 5, 10am; Alliance Francaise de Chicago, 18 N Dearborn St. $5. The organizing curator at the Louvre discusses his upcoming exhibition of American artists who were influenced by their experiences at the museum.

George Packer
Nov 5, noon; Northwestern University, Thorne Auditorium, 375 E Chicago Ave. $5. The New Yorker staff writer's new book, The Assassins' Gate, received a huge boost when author Christopher Hitchens blew sunshine up its spine some six months before publication. In it, Packer toes the line between wonky analysis and straight reportage to craft a compelling read about the ramp-up, execution and flop of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Debra Dickerson
Nov 5, 4pm; Loyola University, Rubloff Auditorium, 25 E Pearson St. $5. Dickerson, author of An American Story and The End of Blackness, is one of the most important American voices on race. She'll bring that same wit to her talk about returning to the church after 30 years.

David Bright Sheng & David Henry Hwang
Nov 5, 7:30pm; Thorne Auditorium. $5. Composer Bright Sheng fuses the traditions of his native China with those of Western classical music without diluting either. He and Tony Award–winning (M. Butterfly) playwright David Henry Hwang discuss their collaboration on the opera The Silver River.

Jonathan Kozol
Nov 6, 2pm; First United Methodist Church. $5. Kozol won a National Book Award in 1968 for Death at an Early Age, a chronicle of the struggles he faced teaching African-American children in the Boston Public Schools system. His latest, The Shame of the Nation, finds the U.S.'s urban schools no better off today, plagued by the dramatic dropout rates among blacks and Latinos and increasing segregation.

Mary Frances Berry
Nov 6, 4pm; Field Museum, Simpson Theater, 1400 S Lake Shore Dr. $5. The always controversial former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights got into it with Dubya, refusing to seat two of his appointments to the board before resigning last year. Likewise, she was fired from her post by Reagan, only to sue and win reinstatement. That's two-for-two in our book.

LOOK HEAR: A French and American Evening of Words, Music and Video
Nov 11, 7:30pm; Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E Chicago Ave. $15. Authors Rick Moody (The Ice Storm) and Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves) read against a backdrop of music by Richard Pinhas, Sylvain Chauveau, JérÔme Schmidt and Amy Dissanayake, and videos by French artists V.J. Milosh and Eric Arlix.

Tom Bissell and Gary Shteyngart
Nov 13, 3pm; Harold Washington Library Center. $5. Two great, young fiction writers talk about pulling material from their experiences in other countries. Bissell, in some parts known more for his criticism, is the author of the story collection God Lives in St. Petersburg. The always-hilarious Shteyngart wrote the fantastic novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook.

Elizabeth Futral and Cori Ellison
Nov 13, 7:30pm; Field Museum, Simpson Theater. $10. Ellison, the New York City Opera's dramaturge, discusses Handel, the German-born composer who spent most of his career in England. World-renowned soprano and Lyric fave Futral will sing several of Handel's vocal works.