+ Kristi Dykema Cheramie on a massive physical model of the Mississippi River; Chicago, poetically, is the sump pump.

+ Meera Lee Sethi on infantile anorexia: "You are born with the blueprint for hunger tattooed onto your cells, an appetite for food that is inseparable from the appetite for life. This is how it works—until it doesn’t."

+ The U of C’s magazine profiles David Schalliol, one of my favorite local photographers.

+ Hunter Clauss on ward politics after Daley.

+ Cabdriver, artist, and writer Dmitry Samarov celebrates his new ride.

+ Elizabeth Warren, who’s setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while warring with the GOP, delivers a lecture for the Chicago Humanities Festival:

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+ Playwright Robert Patrick memorializes fellow playwright and friend Lanford Wilson, whose The Hot L Baltimore runs through May at Steppenwolf. Via Roy Edroso, who writes:

Wilson had a great gift for what you might call poetic realism if that term didn’t sound so high-falutin’; his characters are grounded and believable even when (as often) they’re eccentric, but their language is musically, painstakingly tuned. Any of them — a stoner musician, a mountain man, an accountant, a prostitute — might suddenly launch into an aria that will have you momentarily forgetting everything else, immersed in the power and beauty of the words.