Dear Reader,
We’ve officially made it to the end of Week Five. From film crews on campus to the 45th annual Arts and Humanities Day, here are the headlines you might have missed during midterm season.
News
Netflix crews took over Ida Noyes Hall, Botany Pond, the main quad, and other campus spots earlier this month to film Saturn Return, a romance set in Chicago starring Rachel Brosnahan, Charles Melton, and Will Poulter. A few students even had the chance to step in as extras.
The UChicago Transit Enthusiasts and Explorers RSO, along with groups from other Chicago-area universities, will visit Springfield in November to advocate against impending Chicago Transit Authority cuts. “We can’t sit here and talk about how great transportation is as it’s being dismantled,” said Transit Enthusiasts President Dariel Cruz Rodriguez.
The University held its 45th annual Arts and Humanities Day on October 18. Guests included writers Amitav Ghosh and Roxane Gay and photographer Sally Mann. Actor and carpenter Nick Offerman closed out the day’s programming with a lecture, musical performance, and live woodworking demonstration in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.
The University of Chicago Real Estate Investment Group launched a $100,000 student-managed investment fund, thanks to a donation by two alumni and founding members of the organization. The fund will focus on publicly traded real estate investment trusts, commercial mortgage-backed securities, and other real estate–related equities. A portion of its annual returns will be allocated to the Odyssey Scholarship Program.
Viewpoints
The Beyond Prisons program, a teaching and learning initiative that organized courses in Illinois prisons for both incarcerated and undergraduate students, is ending due to budget cuts.
“What administrators frame as fiscal restraint functions instead as a quiet endorsement of growing political repression—a shift away from programs that build solidarity and toward ones that protect the institutional status quo and, above all, profits,” write students and Beyond Prisons members Taji Chesimet, Harley Pomper, and Neomi Rao.
“The boundary between public safety and state power is dissolving fast, and once that line is gone, fear and surveillance are no longer things of the past and become our reality,” writes columnist Adam Zaidi in a new op-ed about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s policing tactics.
Retired rear admiral and former Pentagon, State Department, and White House spokesperson John Kirby was appointed director of the Institute of Politics last week. “At the University of Chicago, the appointment of genocide enablers and imperialist stooges is just institutional neutrality at work,” write Students for Justice in Palestine.
Arts
Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois turned 20 this summer. Arts Reporter Elias Buttress reflects on the iconic album two decades on, saying, “It still feels like a gift.”
Arts reporter João Pedro do Prado Sanches reviews the Smart Museum of Art’s Smart to the Core: Wise to Power, on view through February 2026. The exhibit, drawn primarily from the museum’s permanent collection, explores ideas and questions from UChicago social sciences Core class “Power, Identity, Resistance.”
From the archives
The Daily Maroon, October 25, 1934
Happy Halloween from the Maroon!
