Humans name their babies and their pets and their battleships. And their buildings. I’ve lived in Chicago buildings by the names of 135 N. Leamington Ave. and 7943 S. California [...]
Christopher Chandler, a former journalist at the Chicago Sun-Times and WBBM-TV (Channel 2), was an important press aide for Harold Washington. He organized news conferences, planned media strategy and dealt [...]
In July, 1864, Gen. Jubal Early and his 15,000 Confederate troops were again raiding the North and threatening the federal capital of Washington, D.C. It was a maneuver aimed at [...]
In Amsterdam, on the sunny and otherwise quiet morning of Friday, August 4, 1944, a car pulled up in front of the Opekta warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht. That is all [...]
When I was laid off by the Chicago Tribune five and a half years ago, I lost my desk and my byline, but also the community of smart, curious and [...]
It was maybe an hour after I finished reading Laird Hunt’s new novel Neverhome that the gears of my mind suddenly shifted and fell into place.. Up until that point, [...]
Sigmund Freud once said that, if you take a widely diverse set of people and starve them, soon all their differences will fall away to be replaced by “the uniform [...]
Give David McCullough credit. After a hugely successful career as a historian, he set out, in his late 60s, to write a book that was a far cry from his [...]
The bust of Abraham Lincoln II My suspicion is that you don’t know that there was an Abraham Lincoln II. I hadn’t until I read Treasures of the Abraham [...]
Miriam is dying. Her twin brother Antonio has brought to her hospital room her two young sons 12-year-old Chris and 10-year-old Tony. Her ex-husband Charlie, whose idea of a good [...]