Days after Rahm Emanuel left his job as chief of staff on October 1st to return here to run for mayor, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote the “The Soft Side.” The column was weirdly worded—“Flawed like all of us, [Rahm] is a full human being, rich and fertile from the inside out”—and provided plenty of easy laughs for Brooks/Rahm detractors. Today, Brooks did it again…
How a federal government program helped fund the renovation of Chicago’s lavish Blackstone Hotel; Mayor Daley proposes a fix to the city’s popular identity; Cinkus violations are this month’s residency requirement; and more
Big Brother was watching Motorola’s Xoom tablet ad during the Super Bowl to make sure it didn’t borrow too much from George Orwell’s 1949 classic. But Big Brother owes his existence to other people’s prose…
I don’t like Dibs. Saving your parking spot with a folding chair or a cone or a box of diapers may be part and parcel of winter here, but the whole practice strikes me as a very un-Chicago thing to do. It is basically saying to your neighbors, the people with whom you are presumably … Read more
Groupon’s self- and audience-satirizing ads have upset a lot of people, even if their intent was charitable. What went wrong: the medium or the message?
Snow shoveling is one of those guy-pride things, but it inevitably leads to snow shovel-phobia, especially if heart problems run in your family: the fear that clearing your car or walk will cause you to suffer one of the heart attacks that inevitably follow a big blizzard.
FROM JUNE 2001: Donald Rumsfeld mended an old family feud to join the Bush Administration as Secretary of Defense, quickly emerging as one of the most powerful figures in Washington. Still, this smart, aggressive, hugely ambitious Chicagoan (New Trier ’50) probably never dreamed that his career would end in the same office he had occupied 25 years ago. Maybe it won’t.
Whom should a Chicagoan root for in the Super Bowl? It’s not as simple as you think.
WORTH THE WAIT: A Sisyphean book project finally sees the light of day
During the 2008 campaign season, a skinny young presidential candidate adopted a sophisticated campaign graphics-design scheme that impressed the design world—and catapulted him to victory. And now, Chicago mayoral campaigns are looking a lot like Barack’s…
