let's do fun things
cultured. spanish edition
cultured is a language-exchange mixer built around curiosity, culture, and conversation, we're teaming up with chicago travel club and one thousand chicagoans to put it on
this is going to be at whispers at oak street beach, you'll be sat at tables with groups and order amazing food and drinks
if you've never played lotteria, it is a super popular and fun, deeply traditional mexican game
we're going to have other games, structured practice, and shuffle groups so you get the opportunity to chat with different people.
this isn’t a class and it’s not about being fluent. say it wrong, that’s the point. the goal is to start conversations, learn through connection and games, and meet people who are genuinely curious about the world and each other.
come curious. leave cultured.
usually a early-20s to mid-30s crowd.
this event has ended
here's what's coming up that you might like.
last call lectures: lie better, laugh more: the linguistics of humor and deceit
The Scout Waterhouse + Kitchen
1419 N Wells St, Chicago, IL 60610, USA
last call lectures presents lie better, laugh more: the linguistics of humor and deceit all of us have laughed, and whether we want to admit it or not, all of us have lied. what we didn't know is that deceit and humor have more in common than we thought. this lecture we're digging into why jokes and lies both hinge on a listener expecting one thing and getting another, what your word choice gives away when you're bending the truth, and why the best comedians are, linguistically speaking, doing the same trick as the best liars. leading the night is dr. jason riggle, a professor at the university of chicago. dr. riggle brings 20+ years of experience working in the linguistics field and is currently working on their book, the linguistics of humor and deceit. here is how the night runs: dr. riggle opens with a 45 minute lecture, followed by 15 minutes of live q&a. then we break into small groups for 45 minutes of guided discussion, closing with a 15 minute debrief to bring it all back together. stick around after for mingling, this crowd always has more to say.
last call lectures: the epic journey of the odyssey: from the iliad to the aeneid to imax theaters
The Scout Waterhouse + Kitchen
1419 N Wells St, Chicago, IL 60610, USA
christopher nolan just spent a quarter-billion dollars reminding everyone that one of the hottest stories of 2026 is also roughly 2,800 years old. but before odysseus was matt damon, before the trojan war was an imax spectacle, and long before western civilization decided that reading dead greeks made you sophisticated, there was homer: a probably-not-one-guy poet telling enormous stories about war, monsters, gods, bad decisions, wounded egos, and one man taking an absolutely unreasonable amount of time to get home. in this lecture, historian dr. john j murphy takes us back to the ancient world to unpack the iliad, the odyssey, and their wildly influential roman successor, virgil’s aeneid. we’ll meet heroes who are brave, petty, horny, traumatized, occasionally brilliant, and spectacularly bad at conflict resolution—and ask how their stories became some of the foundational texts of western literature. then we’re heading to the movies. what does christopher nolan keep from homer? what does he throw overboard? why make the gods quieter, the war darker, and odysseus more recognizably human? and when you adapt a story that has already survived nearly three millennia of retellings, is changing it actually a betrayal, or the most homeric thing you could possibly do? come for the cyclops. stay for the fall of troy, roman propaganda, ancient masculinity, unreliable narrators, extremely vindictive gods, and the realization that basically every road movie, war story, homecoming narrative, and “one last job before i can go home” plot owes homer his flowers. we’ve spent 2,800 years telling the same stories; christopher nolan just put them back in imax.
last call lectures: risk, reward, repeat: the neuroscience behind why we gamble
Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA
our brains are there to keep us from making bad decisions, but when you light up its reward circuit, all it wants is to achieve that high again. good decision or not. and when your brain starts convince you the next pull is the one that pays off, it's hard to get it to stop. modern gambling is built around this principle, and this lecture is going to dive into the neuroscience that created the $70 billion annual industry. this week's presenter dr. viral mistry, a neuroscience educator at dominican university, has spent years studying how nervous systems learn, and is a passionate advocate of making neuroscience findings approachable to the public. why do near misses feel like almost-wins? why are some brains built to chase the risk while others walk away? and what, if anything, can we as the broader public do about it? dr. mistry will answer these questions and more on tuesday, september 29. here is how the night runs: our lecturer opens with a 45-minute talk, followed by 15-minutes of live q&a. then we break into small groups for 45-minutes of guided discussion with fellow readers, closing with a short debrief to bring it all back together. stick around after for mingling and connecting with others who are just as curious as you are.