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Arts & Entertainment

In Check Please, an award-winning short film by Shane Chung ’24, two co-workers who share Korean heritage fight each other for the right to pay the bill at a restaurant, using Jackie Chan–inspired martial arts.

Splitting the bill is a splitting headache

Shane Chung holds a collection of papers while gesturing with his left hand while standing inside a bar.

Fall Reads

Fall 2025
If you like mystery thrillers, sports, history, magical realism, horror or owls, these alumni have you covered.

Add these to your list

A photograph of five books leaning on each other, including The Antidote by Karen Russell; Your Favorite Scary Movie: How the Scream Films Rewrote the Rules of Horror by Ashley Cullins; On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports by Christine Brennan; Guide Me Home by Attica Locke; and Flaco: The Owl Who Escaped Captivity and Won the Hearts of the World by Jonathan Hollingsworth.
Northwestern is frequently mentioned in clues and questions on the iconic prime-time quiz show Jeopardy! At least 30 alumni and students have competed for fame and fortune on the show.

Test your knowledge

A blue rectangle with white text displays a Jeopardy! question that reads, “You can go to Northeastern in Boston, or you can go to this directional school in Evanston, Illinois.”
Since 1980, MBA students at the Kellogg School of Management have come together to write, direct and perform in Special K!, a musical comedy show featuring singing, dancing and drama sketches about life at Kellogg.

Read the story

Special K Hero
Following her sold-out off-Broadway performances in New York City, Liz Coin ’19 is bringing her one-woman show, Lizzy Sunshine, to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The show explores what it’s like to be the little sister of someone struggling with addiction.

Read the story

Liz Coin wears a huge, fuzzy, yellow-and-white checkered costume while holding a yellow and white umbrella against a blue background
During graduation weekend for Northwestern’s Class of 2025, President Michael Schill sat down with Commencement speaker Steve Carell ’25 H, parent of both a recent alum and a current student. Schill’s test sparked a novel rendition of the Northwestern fight song and a discussion of the challenges of improvising Chekhov and featured a spoiler-heavy recap of Carell’s recent TV roles.

Read the story

Landing Image Carell
Barry Joseph ’91 has a long-running fascination with fizzy drinks, particularly seltzer, and he wants others to learn all about its effervescent history. In summer 2024 Joseph launched the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum, a partnership with the oldest seltzer factory in New York City.

Learn more about the museum.

A wooden crate holds blue and tan bottles with ingredients to make an egg cream.
At just 28, Selina Fillinger became one of the youngest woman playwrights in Broadway history, and her 2022 show, POTUS, received three Tony Award nominations and has since been produced in theaters across the nation and internationally. Fillinger ’16 came to Northwestern to pursue acting, but a playwriting class with theater professor of instruction Laura Schellhardt ’97 changed her trajectory.

Get to know Fillinger

A grayscale image of Fillinger looking off into the distance.

Body Snatchers

Spring 2025
By day, Amanda Dunlap edits film trailers for Disney, but by night, she’s a true-crime junkie. Dunlap ’06 took inspiration for her debut novel from stories of real-life “resurrection men,” grave robbers who sold stolen corpses to medical schools in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the early 19th century.

Uncover more about Dunlap’s novel and the history of body-snatching.

A tan book cover with a sketch of the human skeletal system overlayed by the title, The Resurrectionist.
Melissa Harris ’02 had just joined the Chicago Tribune as a columnist in 2009 when a colleague recommended she read the 1967 Division Street: America, a book which contains oral histories from 71 Chicagoans interviewed in the late ’60s. Years later, when Harris learned that the audio tapes of the original interviews were being digitized by the Library of Congress, she reached out to Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mary Schmich, and after some consideration they decided to make a podcast.

Learn more about the podcast.

A grayscale image of Studs Terkel leaning back in an office chair surrounded by books and a typewriter.