Field Museum of Natural History

I occasionally make a list of things I've liked recently. Here's one for the holidays. 1. Gift idea: a pizza stone My colleague Kevin Pang, culinary savant, told me I had to put this on the list. His testimonial: "This $45 slab of rock has changed...

We all know that the holidays are commercialized. For those looking for an alternative to the mass pandemonium of the malls, gift shops at Chicago museums offer presents with local interest as well as artistic and educational panache. And in many cases,...

The campfire was in a metal pit, under a great, wide roof. The tents were pitched on a well-tended lawn, with help from people who work for an outdoors store. Bears were a threat only if someone had forgotten to lock an enclosure door. And dinner was...

Greg Wasson gambled away a total of about $60 during the 2 1/2 years he lived in Las Vegas. All of it came while he was parked at some low-stakes slot machine, waiting for his out-of-town guests to wrap up their requisite casino visit.    Wasson, 53,...

STAGE The Christmas Schooner Have yourself a City of Big Shoulders Christmas at the Mercury Theater, the current home of the beloved Chicago musical, “The Christmas Schooner.” Created by John Reeger and Julie Shannon, “Schooner”...

The video game is 40. Its exact birthday is arguable. Cultural historians likely would date its origins further back, roughly a decade or two; prototypes of arcade games flourished in university computer labs in the 1950s. But “Pong,” the...

After Mark Cobb and his 12-year-old son Matthew finished an early morning deer hunting trip Sunday, he sat at the kitchen table and checked pictures from one of his two trail cameras, hoping they would show a prized buck he could track. As Cobb, 50, of...

Taxidermy is not front and center at the Oriental Institute Museum's new ornithological exhibition That art form is better observed to the north, at the Field Museum, where the institution's Ronald and Christina Gidwitz Hall of Birds has recently been...

A seldom-explored aspect of Indian culture and history is getting some much-deserved exposure at Chicago's Field Museum. "Maharaja: The Splendor of India's Royal Courts," opening Wednesday and running through Feb. 3, tells the story of these rulers...

  A touring exhibition coming to Ellendale, N.D., shows dozens of ways of looking at birds through paintings, photographs, prints, video, and electronic media, according to a news release.  “Winged Shadows: Life Among Birds” opens Friday...

Arachnophobic Chicagoans want to hear "flying" and "spider" in the same sentence probably as much as "ketchup" and "hot dog." But that's the phrase that the bug-squeamish have been treated to this week, when a note posted to guests at the Hilton Chicago...

A good museum is constantly revising and reinventing itself. So it is that the Field's newly named Ronald and Christina Gidwitz Hall of Birds reopened Tuesday after an extensive renovation. This mecca of bird-watching (stuffed-and-mounted division) still...