There are places around the Chicago area where you stand in one spot and feel the past while glimpsing hints of the future. The land there glows with poignancy about this time, when the old year is not quite dead and the new one not quite ready. Places like this change every year, dictated by the events of the year itself. As I write this at the end of 2025, I’m thinking of the streets in Little Village and Pilsen, where residents were pulled from cars and homes. In Broadview, it’s a nondescript processing facility straight out of a dystopia. At the edge of Jackson Park, it’s the Obama Presidential Center, looking a lot like the Rebel base in “Star Wars.” In Arlington Heights, it’s a vast meadow that could replace Soldier Field. In West Town, it’s a parking lot where AI-assisted delivery ‘bots assemble, awaiting orders.
Who sees the path ahead here?
Who knows a way forward?
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We are in that liminal time on the calendar when the light is too dim to know what to expect. You wonder how you’ll respond to whatever’s coming. Some love this time of year, with its chances for reflections and new beginnings, but I tend to worry. Let’s not forget, that this time of year, a decade ago, Jan. 10, 2016, David Bowie died. As Gary Oldman told an interviewer recently, “Don’t you feel that since he died the world’s gone to (expletive)? It was like he was cosmic glue.” He’s eerily right. Still, Bowie understood the promise in a liminal moment: “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being, go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel your feet are quite touching, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
He’s missed every day.
He grasped instinctively what we take for granted or prefer to ignore, that our culture, that the arts, reminds us constantly how to respond to the world, offering practical lessons, philosophical mettle. Teenagers used to watch movies to learn how to smoke and kiss. Maybe TV taught you how to cook. But empathy, observation, perseverance — culture also helps us model our responses to the next dumpster fire. It reminds us of how to be at times of uncertainly. Not a day passes I don’t think of this line from “Jaws,” and it’s not the famous bigger-boat one you probably got sick of hearing during the 50th anniversary last summer, but: “It’s only an island if you look at it from the water.”
Perspective matters.
But perspective, to borrow a word from Oldman, can also feel cosmic.
Bad Bunny was always meant to perform a Super Bowl half-time show in the next few weeks, entirely in Spanish. Just as Rosalía was always meant to sell out a show this summer at the United Center, a concert in support of an album (“Lux”) that weaves together 13 different languages, including Japanese, German and Hebrew. The universe, and perspectives, aligned. Visit Little Village and Pilsen. The perspective of language, visual and otherwise, never felt more complex. Every dark SUV gets a second look. But street vendors still fly Mexican flags from card tables and dangle Bears ponchos from tree branches. Mannequins still stand on sidewalks offering tracksuits. Ornate waves of graffiti remain, amended with fast four-letter scrawls of resistance, and placards pledging neighborhood unity are just now starting to peel away from windows.
Language, we’re reminded, feels like a liminal space.
Stephen Colbert will do his last show on CBS in 2026, some say because of language he used in 2025; conversely, Jimmy Kimmel, and particularly “South Park,” were lessons in free speech. You can hear a similar celebratory bluntness in how the Chicago History Museum titled one of its best exhibits “Aqui en Chicago.” Same for Wrightwood 659‘s 2025 blockbuster “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939.”
During the same months those shows opened, federal agencies scrubbed their websites and documents of scores of words, presumably to limit perspectives to a single vision; they removed “accessible” and “belong” and “equity” and “female” and “Black” and “elderly” and “low-income housing” and “LGBTQ” and “hispanic” and “hate” and “indigenous” and “evidence-based” and “activism” and “autism” and “obesity” and “sex” and “rural water” and “race” and “peanut allergies” and “oppression” and “disparity” and “cultural differences” and “disabled” and “tax credits” and “trans” and “underprivileged” and “underserved” and “understudied” and “undervalued” and “political” and “definition.”
Of course it would have to be cosmic for all of this to happen just as the nation prepares for its 250th anniversary as a democracy — right? If you were writing a screenplay about 2025, for believability’s sake, you might even avoid the biggest liminal black hole of Chicagoland, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Broadview, which looms in the western suburbs, a long gray-blue leviathan, reminiscent of no place at all.
Like many manufacturing spaces outside Chicago, it’s standard No there there. Which was one of the reasons it unwittingly became such an effective staging area for activism in 2025 — it’s a blank canvas, ideal for inflatable frogs and protest signs quoting “Andor,” that Disney the best example of pop culture in the past 12 months urging us to reply boldly to our times, to use what you have. Like Hamza Walker did. In 2022, the former Chicago art-scene mainstay purchased the controversial Stonewall Jackson statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, for The Brick, his Los Angeles galley; in 2025, he let artist Kara Walker reassemble it for an acclaimed exhibition that recreated and reimagined Confederate monuments.
It’ll be hard to step into 2026 without thinking back on the sights and sounds of pushback in 2025, when Chicago stepped up to its reputation as a no-nonsense factory of civic ass-kickers. The plastic whistles and the car horns and the street brawls and the neighborhoods emptying into streets — the whole communities playing immovable rock to unstoppable federal force. That’s a cultural loop in real time, the Chicago Way we’ve long prided ourselves about, the whole we-can-talk-about-Chicago-but-you-can’t thing, all of those “STFU ABOUT CHICAGO” T-shirts that were made, now serving Chicagoans well. You might even catch a whiff of the Chicago Way again in spring, when ICE is threatening to strike back, around the time that “The Bride!” opens starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, relocating “Frankenstein” and its be-careful-what-you-provoke message to a scrappy, proletarian 1930s Chicago. But then, I also see the Chicago Way daily — barely, but there — in PE Guy, that ubiquitous 2025 social-media takedown of private equity, played by Johnny Hilbrant, a Winnetka satirist.
What’s harder to see is if this future is avoidable.
Go to the Broadview facility now. Chances are you’ll see a single ICE agent wearing a mask and standing on a backstreet, directing a scattering of traffic, and that’s about it.
The place has grown inevitable, almost another ordinary block. I’m reminded of the site of the proposed Chicago Bears stadium on the grounds of Arlington Heights Park horse track, the spot that seemed for most of the year to be the future home of the team, until they began floating an even worse idea of moving to Indiana. Endless fencing circles endless beige grounds, itself surrounded by low-slung homes and strip malls and a knoll lined with skeletal trees. Trudging across six lanes of highway, and expanses of parking lot, to reach Soldier Field never had many fans, but there is zero romance in this new spot. This is no downtown. And yet, you saw those recently-unveiled sketches. It all looks so probable, here or elsewhere — so huge and shiny it blocks out sky.
If those two liminal spaces share anything, it’s the sense that no one — other than those who benefit politically or financially — really wanted or asked for them.
They’re like the B-side to the cultural surprise of Chase Infinity, the ray of sun no one knew they needed in 2025, the Columbia College-trained actress who steals “One Battle After Another” from Leonardo DiCaprio (and will likely be nominated for an Oscar soon). She’s our A-Side future — albeit, to flip back again, she’s the future of movies as the future of movies is iffier than ever. Can you imagine breaking into the industry just as Steven Spielberg has to make PSAs urging audiences to see “Hamnet” (which he produced) with an audience? Could 2026 be the first year of a fresh love for movie theaters? Or more calcifying nostalgia? Spielberg’s next film as a director — opening in June — is a UFO epic, being touted as a return to one of his classic subjects. There’s also a new “Wuthering Heights” with Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie that, if marketing can be trusted, makes the case for old-school windswept Hollywood. Christopher Nolan will be going decidedly old-school with “The Odyssey,” while posters and trailers for “The Mandalorian & Grogu,” the next “Star Wars” movie, promise old-fashioned popcorn fun.
Be cynical about a lack of new ideas.
Or remind yourself, however contrived, there remains an impulse there for community and people, and the occasional question of what we still owe each other. Ambition looks far from dead. “Vigil,” the latest novel from Oak Park native George Saunders (arriving in late January), is strange enough to probably risk a few fans. Some of the most exciting new music of 2025 — the return of ‘90s Chicago with Tortoise and new Chicago with Horsegirl, the singular dance experiments of FKA Twigs, even the roar of the hype train for Cameron Winter and Geese — occupied liminal spaces, holding a foot in the past while pointing to a more idiosyncratic future. Speaking of which: Mike Reed’s Sound & Gravity replaced the Pitchfork festival with a more intimate future. Theaster Gates’s 2025 solo show at the Smart Museum felt of a piece with the surge of adult Show & Tell nights — both yearning to connect strangers via the tangible objects of the pasts. “Pluribus” on Apple TV, the streaming service’s most popular series, is even centered on an fitting question for the mid-2020s: How important is individuality to you anymore?
That’s not a hypothetical.
Go to West Town, just west of Ashland Avenue.
Go at the right time, to the right place, and you might notice what I ran across the other night: a fleet of AI-assisted delivery robots, scurrying around white vans outside a warehouse, their round white eyes staring ahead, looking as if they just saw ghosts, blinking with an impressive subtlety. Their faces, becoming common throughout North Side neighborhoods, want you to empathize with what are essential rolling appliances.
They would love if you could just soften the unease you’re feeling, thank you.
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Because, as 2025 fades into 2026, we have made it to the IRL choose-your-own-adventure fork in the road we knew would arrive, forcing us to move on from liminal uncertainty. Embrace AI or not. Keep streaming movies or not. Censor your language or not. Options, of course, are not always so stark, or bad. We passed on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, opening in Los Angeles this fall, but we do get the Obama Presidential Center in June. Those decisions feel poignant now — you might even say cosmic. As if they were waiting for the moment when they mattered most — a monument to a famously measured president debuts during a infamously caustic administration.
Culture trickles down, informs, changes things.
Just after Thanksgiving I dropped off a rental car at the airport in Boston and the attendant asked where I was headed. Chicago, I said. Oh, man, he said, you live there? Chicago’s been inspiring, he said — Chicago knows how to do it, Chicago is not playing.
And to think, it began with a plastic whistle.