The fall Chicago Humanities Festival, since 1989, brings thinkers, dreamers, doers, writers, artists, performers to our city for dozens of events that stretch for more than two weeks.
We are in the thick of it. The theme this time is “citizens†and so far I’ve heard about effective altruism from moral ethicist Peter Singer, extreme weather and social infrastructure from Erik Klinenberg, the 1978 Mideast peace agreement with author Lawrence Wright, the story of Lafayette and our nation’s founding fathers with funny girl Sarah Vowell, and Marlon James on Caribbean literature. He’s the Jamaican writer who recently won the Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings.
Some events are a chat: Lawrence Wright with radio host Mark Bazer, Marlon James with poet Roger Bonair-Agard. Others, like Singer and Klinenberg, are a university-style lecture. Vowell read from her work but cracked jokes while pointing out some things we forget: sure our country is fractured, but it’s not the Civil War. Obnoxious protestors? It’s a treasured right.
This weekend: Salman Rushdie, essayist Meghan Daum, writer Daniel Alarcon.
Tickets are typically $12; events are priceless. I’m put back in the place of a university student, lapping up wisdom, making connections, talking later with friends and family about issues raised. James talked about erasure “Mother England is not my 
mother,†while Wright, chillingly, described the current situation in the Middle East as intractable and, in the near future, increasingly violent.
Events are held at museums, universities, concert halls all over the city and in Evanston, introducing me to old and new spaces, like the luminous Gratz Center at Fourth Presbyterian Church.
The CHF fall season continues through Nov. 8. Events are offered year round, but fall is the main event.
With bookstores in short supply, it’s a treat to pick up books at these events. (I always leave wanting more.) I’m reading Lawrence Wright’s “Thirteen Days in September,†fluid and smart, as with all 
his work. His nonfiction is an antidote to Lauren Groff’s “Fates and Furies,†a big piece of fiction I read last week that left me befuddled. Did I hate it? Love it? James Wood in the New Yorker was similarly dazzled and dismayed.
Happy fall: today it’s 72 and sunny in Chicago. Bliss.