Patrick Fitzgerald may have arrived in town as the new U.S. attorney in August 2001, but he didn't really arrive until April 2, 2002, when he stood before the television cameras and announced the stunning news: Gov. George Ryan's three-decades-old campaign committee was being charged as a "criminal enterprise" whose thirst for money had led … Read more
“Kill your parents!” urged sixties leftist Bill Ayers, whose father was the chairman of Commonwealth Edison here. In Ayers’s new memoir, Fugitive Days, he reconciles his militant past with his present identity: father of three, esteemed professor at UIC—and unabashed patron of the great bourgeois coffee chain, Starbucks
By the time he died at 32 in 1958, Robert Earl Hughes of tiny Fishhook, Illinois, weighed more than 1,000 pounds, earning a place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the largest man on earth. Except for his neighbors and family, few people knew much about his life until recently, when an astonishing photograph sent the author in search of Hughes’s real story: Raised in a sharecropper’s cabin, trapped inside half a ton of flesh, this literate, companionable young man had dreamed of seeing the world. Aside from some carnival tours and one disastrous trip to New York, he never lived his dream. But in his short life, he found something else.
Ann Marie Lipinski may be the most powerful journalist in Chicago. She climbed to the top of the Chicago Tribune masthead in February, becoming the first woman to edit the daily in its 154-year history. In a long career there, she’s already put her mark on the paper, promoting good writing (some say at the cost of solid reporting) and advancing her crew of literate colleagues (dismaying others on the staff). She’s got more plans, including a redesign. Still, can her vision lift the Trib?
THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: We asked Byrne and Bilandic how the snowstorm affected the February mayoral primary.
Pat Burgus thought she would soon be healed when psychiatrist Bennett Braun began treating her for multiple personality disorder. Instead, under hypnosis and on heavy medication, Burgus came to believe she possessed 300 personalities, ate human flesh, and sexually abused her two sons. Later, convinced Braun helped manufacture those memories, she sued. Now, even after receiving a $10.6-million settlement, she won’t let up in her crusade against the man whose treatment, she says, nearly destroyed her
Chicago’s Cubs reigned as the world champions of baseball in 1908, but they’ve been waiting till next year ever since—a record of failure unmatched by any other pro team. Why is this beloved ball club so good at being bad? One tortured fan journeys to the heart of Cub darkness, looking for answers
Before she was a New York senator and a presidential hopeful, Hillary Rodham was a teenage Republican. Here’s our 1994 look at the girl who grew up in Park Ridge.
In the early 1970s, Bernardine Dohrn and her Weatherman cohorts were blowing up buildings. Today, she has a new—respectable—revolution to lead.
A huge black turnout in November 1992 altered Chicago’s electoral landscape—and raised a new political star: a 31-year-old lawyer named Barack Obama.
