For the Chicago Comets, Blindness Is No Impediment to Tough Competition
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: The players on the city’s beep baseball team have the bruises to prove their toughness.
Ad Categories: City Life
What Happened Between David Protess and Medill?
LOSS OF INNOCENCE: The star professor dedicated his 29-year career at Northwestern’s journalism school to overturning wrongful convictions and, in doing so, almost single-handedly prompted the end of the death penalty in Illinois. How did he and Medill come to such a bitter and rancorous end—in which no party escaped untarnished?
Innocent Until Proven Guilty? Not in Public Housing
15 years after Bill Clinton pushed public-housing administrators to strictly enforce “one-strike” penalties, CHA residents can be evicted if anyone in the household commits a minor crime—or even if they’re charged, but not convicted, of one.
Obama/Boehner Jobs Speech Mess: The Buck Stops with Bill Daley
When Bill Daley took over Rahm Emanuel’s job as President Obama’s chief of staff, the conventional wisdom had it that, finally, an adult was in the room. It may be too soon to judge Daley’s performance in the job, but he certainly earns a low grade for the dustup over the scheduling of Obama’s upcoming jobs speech…
Five Great Reads About Working in Chicagoland
A ’20s tattoo artist, a developer and his son, the man behind Sybaris, a “mood director,” and a legendary Chicago courtroom figure: a Labor Day weekend reader.
David Axelrod's Last Campaign Will Also Be His Hardest
Barack Obama’s veteran strategist returns home to Chicago, the city where he cut his teeth, to prepare for the 2012 election. To win the future, he’s looking to the past… perhaps because the future looks cloudy.
Chicago's 'Kind of Broken' 911 System: Why?
The top cop turns heads with a statement that CPD officers sometimes cannot respond to shots-fired 911 calls because they are “tied up on a lower-level priority.” But it’s an old problem that ties into the city’s somewhat inexplicable method of 911 response.
Fermilab Scientist Fixes Airline Boarding
Dr. Jason Steffens, a postdoc at the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, develops an efficient method for boarding a plane, and finds that the block-boarding method has serious flaws.
Mackinac Island: A Weekend Itinerary
STILL LIFE: Get beyond the usual tourist traps and explore the other side with this nature-lovers’ guide
TIFs, Reforms, and Structural Deficits
Is Chicago ready for TIF reform? Perhaps it’s ready for some reasonable changes to the internal workings of the special taxing scheme, but who knows about the future of the city’s structural tax and budget problems.