There are big pizzas, and then there’s The Sheet Show.

Paulie Gee’s Logan Square, fresh off its 10-year anniversary lap, is going full spectacle mode with what might be the largest pizza currently coming out of an Illinois kitchen. We’re talking a grandma-style slab that clocks in at a towering 62 inches by 30 inches. That’s over five feet of crispy-edged, sauce-draped real estate. A pie so large it stops being dinner and starts becoming an event.

This isn’t just a novelty flex, either. The Sheet Show is built to feed roughly 25 people, making it less of a meal and more of a group experience. Think birthdays, team outings, or any excuse to gather a table full of friends who won’t flinch at going all-in on carbs. Compared to the standard Detroit-style squares Paulie Gee’s is known for, this thing feels almost surreal, roughly 23 times the size, stretching across the table like a carb-loaded runway.

Reservations to book The Sheet Show open August 3, and they’re expected to go fast. This is dine-in only, and availability is tight, so if you’re even thinking about it, move quickly. The booking link includes updated details on toppings, pricing, and how the whole experience works.

And yes, it’s more than just the pizza. The full spread includes salads, apps, and drinks, so you can build out a proper feast around the main attraction. Because when the centerpiece is this oversized, you don’t just order sides, you curate a night.

Located at 2451 N Milwaukee Ave, Paulie Gee’s Logan Square has long been a neighborhood anchor, balancing inventive pies with a come-as-you-are energy. The Sheet Show feels like a natural extension of that ethos: bold, a little ridiculous, and entirely rooted in sharing something memorable.

If you’re lucky enough to snag a reservation, bring an appetite and a crew. This isn’t a solo slice situation. This is a full-table, lean-in, pass-the-pie kind of night.

Reservations: https://sevn.ly/xSTqLsxL

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There’s a long-standing myth stitched into the seams of baseball: that the ballpark is a great American commons, a place where the country exhales together under summer skies. It’s a comforting image, one painted in hot dogs, scorecards, and seventh-inning stretches. But as historian Seth S. Tannenbaum reveals, the reality has always been more selective than sentimental.

In this sharply observed exploration, Tannenbaum peels back the ivy to expose a different kind of architecture — one built not just of steel and concrete, but of class lines, racial divides, and economic gatekeeping.

Ballparks, he argues, were never just places to watch a game. They were carefully engineered environments, reflecting the evolving power structure of American cities. While marketed as democratic spaces, they quietly catered to a specific archetype: the middle- and upper-class white male fan. Comfort, safety, and access were not universal amenities — they were privileges.

From the crowded, chaotic intimacy of early urban venues like the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, baseball began a geographic and cultural migration. As cities changed — and as certain fans grew wary of them — so too did the game’s footprint. The move west brought Dodger Stadium, carved into Chavez Ravine under controversial circumstances that displaced working-class communities. Then came the Houston Astrodome, a futuristic, climate-controlled escape that felt less like a neighborhood gathering place and more like a sealed entertainment capsule.

Each evolution carried a message: who the game was for, and just as importantly, who it wasn’t.

Tannenbaum traces how decisions around zoning, financing, and location weren’t incidental — they were intentional. Public funding often supported private gain, while stadium placement subtly redrew the map of belonging. Accessibility was touted, but structural barriers remained baked into the experience.

Inside the gates, the divisions only grew sharper. The rise of tiered seating and luxury suites turned the ballpark into a vertical map of inequality. The higher you climbed financially, the more exclusive the experience became. Baseball didn’t just mirror society’s hierarchy — it monetized it.

Even nostalgia, that powerful current running through the sport, comes under scrutiny. The romantic longing for “simpler” ballparks often glosses over the exclusion embedded in their history. Camden Yards, frequently hailed as a return to baseball’s golden age, offered a curated version of urban life — charming, controlled, and carefully distanced from the complexities just beyond its walls.

Throughout it all, Major League Baseball maintained the language of inclusion. Owners and executives leaned on the idea of the ballpark as an open, welcoming space, while rarely confronting the quieter systems that limited who could fully participate.

What emerges from Tannenbaum’s work is not a condemnation of the game, but a reframing of it. Baseball’s story is inseparable from America’s — a narrative of aspiration shadowed by exclusion, of unity complicated by division.

In the end, the ballpark stands as both symbol and stage. It’s where cheers echo, yes — but also where the contours of the American experience have long been drawn.

And as the game continues to evolve, the question lingers like a fastball at the letters:

Who gets a seat… and who’s still waiting outside the gates?

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At Hyde Park Art Center, the gallery floor becomes a shoreline after the tide has already claimed everything.

In The Paradox of Inaction, interdisciplinary artist Alison Ruttan constructs a haunting, slow-motion catastrophe, an immersive installation that invites viewers to wander through the ghost of a suburban neighborhood swallowed by rising waters. On view from April 4 through July 12, 2026, the exhibition occupies 2,300 square feet with more than 160 cast ceramic forms, each one a fragment of a world that feels both distant and uncomfortably familiar.

At first glance, the work reads as abstraction, a terrain of glistening, irregular shapes. But as the eye adjusts, recognition sets in. Rooflines. Foundations. The quiet geometry of domestic life. Together, these forms coalesce into the illusion of a flooded community, suspended in a state of eerie stillness. The glazed surfaces shimmer like blackwater, evoking rot, reflection, and the slow violence of environmental collapse.

Ruttan’s practice has long engaged with the visual language of trauma, translating large-scale historical and political events into tactile, labor-intensive forms. From the Gombe Chimpanzee War to the Syrian Civil War, her work insists on materializing what often feels distant or abstract. Here, she turns that lens toward the climate crisis, not as a future threat, but as a present condition already unfolding.

The exhibition’s title, The Paradox of Inaction, cuts to the core of its urgency. It challenges the seductive illusion that doing nothing is neutral, that inaction carries no consequence. Instead, Ruttan reveals inaction as its own form of decision-making, one that accelerates risk and narrows the horizon of possibility.

Complementing the main installation, works from her High Water series (2023–2024) appear on the Art Center’s second floor. These smaller ceramic sculptures of flooded homes echo the larger environment below, creating a layered dialogue between miniature and monumental, intimacy and overwhelm.

Ruttan describes immersive installation as a bridge between knowing and understanding. Facts alone, she suggests, rarely move us. But within the space of art, analytical thought and intuitive response begin to overlap. Viewers oscillate between object and meaning, between what is seen and what is felt, arriving somewhere closer to truth.

Part of Hyde Park Art Center’s ongoing commitment to commissioning ambitious, large-scale works, the exhibition continues a legacy that includes artists such as Edra Soto, Faheem Majeed, Lan Tuazon, and Yasmin Spiro. A series of public programs will further activate the space, offering visitors opportunities to engage more deeply with the work and its implications.

More than an exhibition, The Paradox of Inaction is an atmosphere, a warning, and a question. It does not ask what the future will look like. It asks what it already does, and whether we are willing to see it before the water rises any higher.

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