Because the White House remains “Chicago on the Potomac,”—although less so now with the exit of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod—it’s always fascinating to see how the latest Washington insider book portrays Chicagoans in the corridors of the West Wing. The latest of the genre is David Corn’s Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party…
A bit of booze (just below the legal limit!) makes you better able to perform creative tasks, though it makes your memory worse. Probably because it makes your memory worse. A UIC team got some students tipsy and plied them with creative questions to investigate.
Anywhere from nothing to $267 million in 2010, apparently The concepts are pretty simple, but figuring out a hard number is really hard—and even harder if you consider alternatives to Chicago’s TIF system.
Block 37 gets sold, again, as the city’s cursed retail block limps along in the manner we’ve become accustomed to over the past few decades. Here’s a (sort-of) brief history of Block 37: “to know Block 37 is to know Chicago.”
“OH MY GOD, IT’S RAINING HELL!”: Gary Krist’s ‘City of Scoundrels’ recounts Chicago’s unbelievable summer of 1919
Some notes on “Mr. Bellow’s Planet” by Brent Staples, an essay about Hyde Park in the 1970s and racial fears on its streets. Observed four decades ago, written two decades ago, it still sounds entirely familiar.
Yet another iteration of the belief that markets are efficient and that segregation is perfectly natural is drawn by a controversial political writer. But even in a highly segregated city like Chicago, the numbers don’t back it up.
Will Guzzardi, the 24-year-old, Ivy League-educated former Huffington Post Chicago editor, announced Monday that he would pursue a recount in the March 20th primary for the 39th District State Representative. When I spoke to the Brown University graduate on Monday night, he was trailing by 125 votes to five-term incumbent Toni Berrios, the daughter of Cook County Assessor Joe Berrios. Guzzardi said he plans to file…
The beginnings of an oral history of Chicago school teaching; the state of Chicago health care; the neighborhoods with the most flower power; DIY urbanism in Logan Square; and more
I don’t recall arguing about baby names the last two times. Hannah and Max. In my mind, both kids popped out, we had the names ready to go, and that was that. Boom, done. The names fit, and they stuck. In retrospect it’s impossible to imagine them as anything else. You’d think we’d have this process down pat by now, but this time, we can’t imagine the kid at all…
