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On poet Gwendolyn Brooks and how she recorded Chicago's vibrancy

"She's a really interesting case because she also overlaps with Mies in a very particular way: She, as a young woman, worked in this huge apartment building on, I want to say, 31st Street, 34th Street, called The Mecca, which became famous. There were blues songs written about it. And at The Mecca, Gwendolyn Brooks really got her sense of what this new Chicago was going to be like, the new black Chicago in Bronzeville. And at the same time, this is also part of where the Armour Institute, [Illinois Institute of Technology] campus is going to be. Mies ends up in 1955 building his great masterpiece crown hall on the site of The Mecca. So you have this overlap of these two great minds of Chicago talking about the same place in very, very different ways: Brooks from the bottom up and Mies very much from the top down, both masterpieces.

"Brooks was tapped into Chicago in a very special way in that she spoke so much about the domestic aspects of life. One of my favorite photos of her is her walking down 63rd Street with her kids in tow, groceries in her arms — no one notices who she is. She's a great poet of the domestic, and I think that's very true to the Chicago spirit."

On Chicago's street violence

"The most important point about those few streets in the middle of the city is that they belong to all of Chicago. And one of the impulses that one sees there is this discussion of Chicago and black Chicago. And in ... all that I've read, in interviews, there's often this discussion of two different cities. And I think when Chicago finally wraps its hands around all of itself and doesn't speak of it in these two different terms, I think they're going to be a lot closer to solving some of these problems."

Read an excerpt of The Third Coast

Kal Penn has a pretty unusual resume: He has starred in Harold and Kumar, the most successful series of stoner movies made in the past decade; and has served in the White House as the Obama administration's liaison to youth. Now he's hosting a new show, The Big Brain Theory, on the Discovery Channel.

We've invited him to play a game called "Ahhh! Get It Off Me!" You might be surprised to learn you're not alone in your body — there's a whole colony of bacteria and other critters called a "microbiome" living there. We're going to ask Penn three questions about our little unseen friends.

Ursula von Rydingsvard makes huge sculptures out of red cedar. The 70-year-old is one of the few women working in wood on such a scale.

Her pieces are in the permanent collections of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art. And now they're also part of a new show at Manhattan's Museum of Arts and Design. It's called "Against the Grain" — a phrase that could just as well describe the sculptor's life and career.

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Crushed blossoms at the end of the summer: teach me
how to coax nectar from the bloom of another.

Burned rice on the stove again: what's to love
but my imperfections — you'll forgive me another.

Butter by a kettle always melts, warns the proverb.
Heated, greased, we slip one into the other.

When, inexplicably, you enter my prayers,
I hear messages from one god or another.

Me encanta cantar, cuando estoy sola, en el carro.
My mother tongue dissolves. I speak in another.

Heart-thief, enter the fields like a woman in love,
vase in one hand, shears in the other

From Dhaka Dust, copyright 2011 by Dilruba Ahmed. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.