Each November the Chicago Humanities Festival brings to town an embarrassment of intellectual riches for ten days (plus some bonus events in October) of lectures, discussions, performances, and more. In honor of this year’s theme—”Animal: What Makes Us Human”—we posed to some of these thinkers an embarrassment of a question, which you may remember from summer camp: If you were an animal, what would you be, and why?
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Delia Ephron, author, screenwriter, playwright I don’t want to be a wild animal because I’d have to live in the wild. The wild is overrated. Zoos are captivity, basically a life sentence and I don’t want that for sure. So then something domestic, but . . . I don’t even want to be my own dog, although my dog has a very good life, still he does have to sit and stay. I don’t want to be bossed around. A cat’s life seems closest to a writer’s life, sort of introverted and independent. But I’m a dog person. How can I want to be a cat?“Delia Ephron: Sister Mother Husband Dog,” Sun 10/13, 2-3 PM, Northwestern University, Cahn Auditorium, $15
Gil Stein, Oriental Institute director I have to admit that I don’t have a personal favorite animal I would like to be. But I can tell you what Winston Churchill said: “I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” “Different Foods = Different Dudes: A Primer in Zooarchaeology,” Sun 10/20, 5-6 PM, University of Chicago Law School, $8.
Find a full schedule, plus venue information, online at chicagohumanities.org.
