Essay: Defending “unregulated” little free libraries
Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th) thinks the little free libraries along many Chicago sidewalks are bad — very bad. They are “unregulated”! And they’re “popular”! And many of them are planted [...]
Essay: Printers Row – A Celebration of Community
Near the end of last Saturday at this year’s Printers Row Lit Fest, an 80-year-old Italian painter from the North Shore told me she’s going to have a huge party [...]
Essay: Labor Day and a walk with everyone else
The American culture celebrates the rich and powerful. Just look at the news and notice how much is about entertainers and politicians and millionaires and billionaires. On Labor Day, though, [...]
Essay: God Hides like Two-year-old Emma
When I used to come to the door at my granddaughter Emma’s house, she’d hide, usually behind the legs of her mother or father, peeping out on one side or [...]
Essay: Jesus with Eyes Wide Open
Abraham Lincoln and my granddaughter Emma have gotten me curious about Jesus. I mean, about Jesus’s curiosity. It started when I was reading the review of a new biography which [...]
Essay: Reporting History —How to look at Chicago and, well, at all of humanity as a reporter, historian and poet.
I was asked by the Chicago Literary Club, a very old social organization in the city — now in its 149th season — to give the Arthur Baer Fellowship Address [...]
Essay: Rick Kogan and Chicago — Perfectly Matched
In late 1999, Rick Kogan and I were walking north on Astor Street through the Gold Coast, and, if memory serves, Rick was telling me about long ago summers when, [...]
Chicago history: Rediscovering the art of the much-demonized Chicago wheeler-dealer Charles Tyson Yerkes
In the fall of 2003, Sebastian Smee, the art critic of the Daily Telegraph in London, described a mid-19th century painting by British artist J. M. W. Turner as “an [...]
Essay: A Tribute for Marty Kirk, C.M.F.
After Howie Harrington asked me if I would make this tribute to Marty Kirk — of course, I said “yes” — I read Ted Cirone’s short biography of his friend. [...]
Essay: Well, how many books can $30 buy at the Newberry Book Fair?
When I headed to the Newberry Library Book Fair on a Friday at the end of July, I knew I had to come up with a strategy. It’s a locally [...]