No matter how busy they were creating the universe, some gods always found time to lay down the law on what their worshippers should eat. Diets and deities have a […]

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 […]

In her new book Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook Sonya Huber offers a collection of effective essays mostly about her Midwest identity. A longtime essayist and Fairfield University professor, […]

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 […]

Metal, as a genre, is an amusing blend of arrogance and earnestness. Look past the leather and chains, wind-milling manes, and tight animal print pants with padded baskets…ignore the kayfabe […]

Kathleen Osberger’s account of her three harrowing months as a religious volunteer with a community of Catholic nuns in Chile a half century ago brings the reader deep into the […]

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 […]

How can someone be so famous and yet so misunderstood? It’s easy if your name is Hillary Clinton. Gary Scott Smith, author of Do All the Good You Can, contends […]

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 […]