Edward Lifson’s Hello Beautiful! blog features pictures of Chicago’s changing architecture landscape. Between condos like the one featured above (which we think these guys would find tempting) and Zaha Hadid’s long-delayed plans for Millennium Park, it’s a good time to be a design junkie in Chicago. [via Chicago Tribune]

In the ’20s and ’30s, Chicago’s Washington Square Park was a hotbed of rhetoric as poets, preachers, left-wing agitators, and crackpots waxed radical before curious spectators. Popularly known as Bughouse Square, the park eventually fell into disuse, but in the ’80s its reputation as a mecca of free speech and public discussion was revived with the Newberry Library’s annual Bughouse Square Debates.

Flavorpill is the proud media sponsor of this Saturday’s 23rd Annual Bughouse Square Debates. We sat down with Newberry Library’s Director of Public Programs Rachel Bohlmann, Ph.D. to learn more. Read More »

Spending an afternoon with abstract expressionists, batting ideas back and forth about the latest Bacon exhibit, or wandering through a Warhol wonderland is worth more than money can buy. Yet, growing up amid the tentacles of global capitalism, it’s hard to turn our backs on the mantra, “spend, spend, spend” — especially now that shopping is the new religion. That, my friends, is what museum stores are for. Enabling us to get the best of both worlds in a heady combination of art, design, and retail therapy, museum stores let us feel all warm and culturally enriched inside while still feeding our consumer cravings. Here, we run down the best that the culture capitals have to offer.

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Oh, New York, it was a pleasure to spy on you this week. We saw Middlesex, The Great Gatsby, and Jane Eyre in kanji. We saw two novels about the gentrification of our fair city: Lush Life by Richard Price and The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Sure, we’ve seen a lot of these books on the subway before, but they’re great, and we’re always happy to see some one enjoying one of our favorites for the first time. Read More »

[Via Apartment Therapy]

She might have a fictional bun in the oven, but MELORA HARDIN will make her Broadway debut this December as merry murderess Roxie Hart in CHICAGO. (On a side note, the show celebrates it’s 12th anniversary this Friday.)

According to IMDB Hardin played the role of Baby in the short lived TV version of DIRTY DANCING and has released two CDs, THE MELORADRAMA and PURR, so perhaps she has the chops to tackle this role. And then there’s the fact that she and Michael had a safe word…

What do you think? Will she be able to top PAIGE DAVIS?

Related post: TV Do Over: Last Night’s Episode of The Office Where Holly and Michael Break Up

According to TIME‘s RICHARD LACAYO, the slow real estate market has halted the progress on famed Spanish architect SANTIAGO CALATRAVA‘s CHICAGO SPIRE, a project which was originally slated to be completed in 2011. If it’s canceled this will be Calatrava’s second skyscraper to get the ax in recent months — the first was a residential building in Lower Manhattan where 10,000 square foot “cubes” were priced at 30 million dollars a piece.

Is it just us, or could this be a possible silver lining to the current economic mess? And what is it with starchitects and phallic buildings? If this one gets built, it will be the tallest building in America; right now the construction site is home to a 110-foot wide hole.

We’re stopping there before the double entendre becomes too much, and turning the tables on you.
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