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 in city soil! (Collective […]
Near the end of 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 if […]
Forty-five years ago, Jeffrey Sweet wrote a book—the story of Second City, which was then only about a decade old. But Chicago’s preeminent comedy theater had a much longer history, […]
The expedition of discovery Louis Jolliet, a merchant-explorer, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, undertook with five other men in 1673, was a pivotal moment in the history of North […]
In late 1972, Ed Marciniak, a perennial social critic and justice activist, became president of the Institute of Urban Life, a small program affiliated with Loyola University Chicago. He had just […]
Thomas Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 is an impressive and important book that ranks with other works providing the deepest insights into what makes Chicago, Chicago: Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon, […]
Toya Wolfe’s debut novel Last Summer on State Street is a harrowing, poignant, and visceral evocation of life and death in the Robert Taylor public housing development in its final […]
According to the foreword of Kill a Punk for Rock and Roll, music photographer Marty Perez is a very likable guy. The fact that providing a bio in the book […]
In a year or so, the 2024 Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago, marking the 27th time the city has played host to one or both of the major […]
In the handful of years after the Civil War, Illinoisans went crazy for baseball, a game that was then spelled as two words “base ball.” By 1868, however, an editor of […]
Naa Oyo A. Kwate, the author of White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation, will be in conversation with Stacey Sutton on Thursday, April 27, at […]
Author Clément Petitjean asserts early on in his new book, Occupation: Organizer, that the role of a “community organizer” is multifaceted and warrants a comprehensive reassessment. While the general public […]