In Part Two of my Back Down Memory Lane Road Trip, I venture to Barrington, Rhode Island--a small town outside of Providence, where we used to live long, long ago... First thing I notice as my wife and I turn onto Fountain Avenue is that it's not a…
It's day one of my Back-Down-Memory-Lane Road Trip... I call it that cause I've traveled across the country to see where it started. For me. In the east. Before my family moved to Evanston in 1966 and my life really got started. I want to see how …
It feels like I've been enthusiastically reading novels by George Pelecanos since I was born. But, no, I was well past 50 before I'd heard of Pelecanos, much less read one of his novels. This was in 2008 or so when I read a review of his latest. …
Just finished reading Country of Lords, a brilliant account of, well, so many things. First of all, shoutout to Kim Phillips-Fein, the history professor at Columbia University, who wrote it. I learned so much from Country of Lords that I went righ…
In the category of people who keep claiming the sun rises in the west despite all evidence to the contrary... Senate Republicans held yet another hearing designed to prove Trump won an election everyone knows he lost. It was a Senate Judiciary Com…
So, there I was last Saturday afternoon, watching the big game--Texas versus Tennessee--when I saw something I'd never seen in all my years of watching sports. Which is a whole lotta years, let me tell you. This Texas defensive lineman named Colin…
Read an article the other day in The New York Times by a reporter named Teddy Rosenbluth, who I presume is a real person. Though in these days of A.I., you never know. It's about Zou and Pak, a couple of scientists at Stanford, who oversaw a team o…
In the category of if you live long enough, you'll see it all... How is it possible that a developer, even a billionaire, would try to build something in Chicago without really running it by the Daleys? Especially if that developer wants to buy th…
From time to time, I find myself compelled to read the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Or re-read, to be exact. As I'd read most of them by the time I was 30. Which was, as you might imagine, a long time ago. Reading all those stories is no smal…
As soon as word broke that Stevie Wonder was playing the United Center in November, my wife and I did what we've been doing with big-time concerts since 1972. Hopped into our car and drove on down to the United Center to buy our tickets directly fr…
Let's start by carving this into stone... Should the Bears make good on their threat to move to Hammond, Indiana--as I still don't believe they will. As I still believe they want to stay in Illinois, but having painted themselves into a corner by e…
As the sweet summer days turn into autumn nights, my family and I made our annual pilgrimage to Michigan. The northern regions, that is. AKA, MAGA land. It's hard to understand, much less explain, how a country so great could produce a political…
Once again LeBron James made a decision as to where to take his basketball-playing talents, and once again I don't like it. Harumph! Only this time my opposition is more, I don’t know—noble? At least to me. You decide. His first decision came in …
One day last week, I took the train downtown to meet with a gathering of residents in an Italian restaurant on South Michigan Avenue to talk TIFs. Marj Halperin asked me to do it. Said the residents were trying to make sense of the city’s scheme to…
The calendar on the wall says it's 2026, and yet I keep thinking I've gone back in time to 1984. That’s cause my beloved Bulls have a rookie who reminds me of--dare I say what I'm about to say? No, I can't. Seems too soon. Scared I'll jinx that ro…
On the road west, we tangent through the mountains outside Tucson, settling in a lodge that bills itself as a sanctuary for bird watchers. As such, the place's crawling with people, quietly scanning the horizon, binoculars out. It’s my first enco…
It only took over 50 years, but I finally got around to reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem--Joan Didion's iconic essay. Not sure why I didn't read it earlier. It's a classic of New Journalism, a style of non-fiction where the writers put themselv…
In 1996, a magazine writer named Mark Singer got an assignment from his boss that he didn't want to do. Hang around with Donald Trump and write a story about it. I don't blame him for not wanting to hang around with Trump or write about him. Till …
Took me awhile to find my way to John Banville, the great Irish novelist. But find him I did, and now I’m hooked. In the last two months, I've read three of his novels and got a fourth on the way, on order from the library. It’s like fried chicken—…
A few days ago, my wife and I took off for California by way of Iowa, Nebraska and Arizona--by car. Yes, a real road trip. And before I left, I reminded myself... Benny, old, boy--it's a big country out there, and you'll be driving through MAGA la…
I've been writing and thinking about Chicago politics for so long that just about everything I see in politics reminds me of something I've already seen in Chicago. But sometimes Chicago fools me. Sometimes I'll see something in Chicago and think--…
As the self-appointed bridge between those who are addicted to sports and those who know nothing about it, I feel compelled to update the know-nothings about the latest brouhaha gripping Chicago's baseball world. So here goes... First, the name. …
Sad to say, I missed out on the children's poetry by Shel Silverstein--I was born too early. By the time Where the Sidewalk Ends, his first poetry collection, was published, I was almost out of my teens. Too old for such things. That was in 1974.…
The time has come for me to pay homage to the man who knows everything--Dwight Garner, book reviewer extraordinaire for the New York Times. One of my favorite Sunday morning moments occurs when, book review section in hand, I flop on the couch to r…