Tag
Chicago
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Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman
“You want to go outside yourself and imagine your way into some other space? Go for it. If you want to try and imagine yourself into what you think is your own space, go for it. I say it’s equally as hard.”
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Watching “Go Fish” with My Queer 15-Year-Old
“You can wear something to be cool,” you told me, “or because another person likes it. You don’t have to be truly ‘yourself,’ or whatever.”
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Is “Regulation from Below” Possible?
A powerful grassroots movement campaigned in the ’70s and ’80s for banks to reinvest equitably in red-lined urban communities. It failed—but why?
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The US Arrested Her—Then She Changed Chicago
In the 1960s, Chicago’s white neighborhoods didn’t want Mexican Americans moving in. But one determined real estate broker changed everything.
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How Mexican Chicago Remembers Tenochtitlan
500 years have passed since the fall of the Aztec capitol. But like that city, Pilsen’s power lies not in its buildings, but in its people.
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“Redlining Does Not End”: Talking with Rebecca Marchiel on Housing and Racism
“They all wanted to imagine a different possibility of an integrated neighborhood, where folks worked together.”
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Open Letters, Open Secrets: Laurence Ralph on Police Torture in Chicago
“People rise through the ranks and are allowed to hide torture in plain sight because they become complicit.”[none-for-homepage]
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Like Sands through the Hourglass
What will our children remember of this time, when their play and freedom are confined—or freed—by the digital?
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How to Defund the Police
The inconvenient truth of police history in the United States is that police departments were not designed to keep a generic public safe.
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Chicago Yesterday and Today: A Conversation with Carlo Rotella
Carlo Rotella is a professor of American studies, English, and journalism at Boston College; he’s also one of the most talented writers in the humanities … [none-for-homepage]
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What Was Public Housing?
Any debate about American public housing will eventually have to reckon with Chicago. More specifically, it will have to reckon with that city’s wrecked projects. Those closest to the issue have reasons to balk at such a reckoning. After all, as political scientist Edward Goetz points out, the history of American public housing can easily be…
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Michelle Obama’s Embrace
I told Michelle Obama that I admired Becoming for its courage, honesty, risk taking, and optimism. But my admiration went further, because in her story I had seen myself, and not just in the book’s main character …
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Toward the Black Girl Future
To read Eve L. Ewing is to read Chicago. Born and raised in the city’s Logan Square neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, Ewing’s love for the city is palpable in …
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“Our Emancipation Day”: Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago
Chicago’s strategies to keep African American movement limited throughout the city . . .
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Editor 2 Editor: Priya Nelson and Joe Calamia
How important to an editor is the spark one feels (or doesn’t) about a potential project? How does one identify books that are surprising, new, and relevant? And …
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“Say Chi City”
If you want to fall wrackingly, despairingly in love with a place, here’s what you do: leave it. When I was young and wintering out my graduate years, marooned in the penitential bleakness of upstate New York, I grew fond of declaring that, once I turned 30, I was going to go ahead and start…
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How the Cubs Won
Sports history is made all the time—and most of it consists of phenomena that rank at the level of Trivial Pursuits: x number of homeruns, y number of strikeouts, a few hundredths of a second here …
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The Book That Made Me: A Sociologist
A renowned American sociologist reflects on the book that persuaded him to abandon a career playing bar piano in Chicago …
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Chicago Law
Baltimore has The Wire, Newark, The Sopranos, and for seven seasons Chicago has had The Good Wife. The city with North America’s highest number of annual civilian deaths by cop and its very own Guantanamo-aspirant black-site detention facility, Homan Square, the city that has perfected machine politics, election fraud, felony embezzlement, and the pork that…
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All Dovlatov’s Children:Recent Soviet Emigré Literature
To say that Russians love the late Soviet writer Sergei Dovlatov is like saying they love breathing. Born in 1941, Dovlatov worked as a prison guard and journalist before starting to “publish” short stories in the 1970s, via samizdat, the only avenue open at the time for writers who wanted to serve up their fiction…
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How to Buy a Guitar in Chicago
This is a new installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In its still relatively new location on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago’s Northcenter neighborhood, the Chicago Music Exchange immediately dazzles visitors with row upon row of guitars mounted on the walls. Chandeliers drip from the high ceilings, lending a tone of…
