Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Atul Gawande reads from his new book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, today at the University of Chicago. Gawande is a practicing doctor as well as a professor at Harvard Medical School, but he’s also a staff writer at the New Yorker and one of the best non-fiction writers on the planet. His website has a bunch of his articles, including many of his longer NY’er pieces. Even if you’re ambivalent about readings, check out his writing.
In other Web developments, Molly Shanahan made the wise decision to post multimedia from the development of her new piece, My Name is a Blackbird, which premieres Thursday. She’s got videos and mp3, including one of her dancing an excerpt with gorgeous accompaniment by Andrew Bird. It’s a smart decision for an art form that frankly seems kind of inaccessible to a lot of people. I applaud her bravery in putting up what amount to sketches and drafts; it’s tough to broadcast incomplete works, but breaking it down into component pieces makes it a lot more comprehensible to a philistine like me.
