Chicago Humanities Festival Audio & Video

America knows how to market itself, its products, and its ideas. For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, American marketing creativity, power, and prestige influence consumers the world over.

A stunning departure-and compelling return. From Anne Rice, perennial best-selling author and inventor of the modern vampire genre, comes a chilling, hypnotic new novel.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has become one of the most powerful writers today. A staffer for "The Atlantic" and author of a memoir, "The Beautiful Struggle," he shares his stunning and evocative reflections on what it is like to inhabit a black male body in contemporary America.

No news is entirely bad news, as long as it's being delivered by Mo Rocca. A correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning and a frequent panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me!, Rocca has a knack for presenting current events in a way that's both informative and hilarious.

One of the most intrepid-and funniest-science writers working today, Mary Roach has explored sex (Bonk), corpses (Stiff), and digestion (Gulp).

Novelist Ayelet Waldman despaired managing her mood disorder-and her husband and children were suffering too. Then she tried something new: 10 micrograms of LSD.

Just how powerful are our memories? This is the central question of The Water Dancer, the first novel from Ta-Nehisi Coates, well-known for his Atlantic essays, and a National Book Award winner for Between the World and Me.

William Gibson, the forefather of "cyberpunk" science fiction, discusses genre, changing technology, and future trends in this streaming interview.

"If America is essentially an idea, then JAY is its best embodiment," says Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown sociology professor, New York Times contributing opinion writer, and contributing editor of The New Republic.

Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, argues that America is not immune from the authoritarian slide that has caused democracies in Europe and Latin America to collapse.