Sometimes the biggest things go unnoticed. The Uptown Theatre, for example. For a full century it’s stood at 4816 North Broadway, always there but overlooked by passersby since it closed […]
One of the many fascinating things about a city like Chicago is how the lives of millions of strangers are unknowingly intertwined. Barry Pearce gets at this in a savvy […]
The 8-year-old inside me perked up early in my reading of Leaf Town Forever when two friends are hired by Lucinda at the Treasure Shop to search for treasures, such […]
Early on in Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, From the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way, Maxim Samson writes, “Every landscape tells a story—the challenge is […]
As a 13-year-old, I left my family’s home on Chicago’s West Side to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood at a high school seminary about 50 miles away in Momence, […]
This is the third in our series of articles on The Art of Survival, in which we explore how small Chicago arts organizations are surviving post-COVID and weathering the anti-humanist and anti-diversity […]
Cartoonist Robert Crumb is, inarguably, a master of his craft. For 60 years he’s created a distinctive style and memorable characters, while inspiring generations of artists. He’s also a polarizing […]
Early in Making No Compromise, Holly A. Baggett asks how it was that two young Midwestern women from the late 19th-century American Midwest—uncloseted lesbians and lovers, at that—became the international […]
For much of Chicago’s history, its strident boosters with their overblown assertions of the city’s present and, even more, its future greatness have been a subject of ridicule. In 1952, […]
Ernie Banks and Minnie Minoso are the headliners in Don Zminda’s book Justice Batted Last: Ernie Banks, Minnie Minoso and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago’s Major League Teams. But […]
We mostly remember movements through supernaturally charismatic entities who said the right thing at the right time, sparking action, winning souls, and rewriting history. In reality, every movement is made […]
“The house is a house, but it is also a metaphor; it has been described as a quantity of air trapped between floor and roof, … as a glass cage, […]