Politics and music. When trying to juggle two hot coals, more often than not, you’ll get burned. Kathleen Hanna, however, has shown over the past decade that she is more than capable of making smart social commentary while carving a name for herself...

Christine LoFaso doesn’t want you to stereotype the fibers discipline. Fibers, an emphasis for B.F.A. majors in the School of Art, includes papermaking, book arts, fabric painting, printing, dyeing and textile construction. LoFaso, the program’s head,...

Animation is a hip-hop dance group doing its part at NIU to stop segregation. The group promotes racial harmony by being a very ethnically diverse organization. The group originated under the Philippine Student Association. The group was founded by students...

This is not a test. “We tell our students from day one this is not a drill; everything you do goes out to the community,” said Allen May, general broadcast manager of the Northern Television Center. NTC News Tonight is a program run by students enrolled...

A critic can always tell when a biographical film is a success. They always find themselves reviewing the title character more than the film itself. I thought about this before seeing “Ray,” the new film from director Taylor Hackford about the life...

I awoke Wednesday with an odd combination of relief and dread. Despite all hopes, I can’t turn on my television and readily witness someone being called an illiterate flip-flopper with the intent to pack the Supreme Court with Nazis, inject the flu...

Reggae. Giant bat costumes. Spooky drums and bass. Countless Catholic school girls. Zombie dance parties are not for the closed-minded. On Halloween, more than 100 freaks and ghouls finally got their chance to cut a rug at Otto’s, 118 E. Lincoln Highway,...

R. Kelly and Jay-Z are back ... again, with their collaborative album, “Unfinished Business.” In 2002, the pair made their first joint attempt, “The Best of Both Worlds,” which flopped - and the tour was canceled. R. Kelly faced rape charges that...

The Sahara Hotnights are what The Go-Go’s would have sounded like if they had rocked as hard as they partied. Not that the four Hotnights are nymphomaniacal drug addicts. They just know how to write catchy pop gems while playing the role of femme fatales...

Remember those horrible images of cafeterias that you had when you were younger? You’d picture yourself standing in a mile-long line waiting for a bitter, stone-faced woman to slap a spoonful of unidentifiable gumbo onto a tray and shove it in your...

In the past few weeks I have learned two things: A singer would dare to lip-sync on “live” television, and horse slaughtering is a delicate and unfunny subject. This week, I tried my hand at saving horses from slaughter by joining the National Student...

The holiday comedy “Surviving Christmas” opens with a montage of people miserable at Christmastime, including a grotesque scene of an old woman sticking her head in an oven. And the movie doesn’t get much better from there. “Surviving Christmas”...