Column: Fall is here, winter is coming, and along with it, dread
I'd never say this to anyone who doesn't live around here, but among suburban Chicago friends, I'm free to admit it: Our winters stink. Oh, not the Novembers and Decembers....
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Column: The five elephants and the media’s duty to truth
Our 2-year-old has found his voice. Until a couple of weeks ago, his language skills mostly consisted of parroting everything his older brother said, like a tiny and particularly slavish...
Column: Our problems are big, Pluto is small and golf is great
I have a small complaint. It's minor really: nitpicking, you could argue, but I'd love for everyone to stop blaming 2020 for everything bad that happens. After news of actor...
Column: Will we ever get back to ‘normal’? Don’t count on it.
A hundred years have passed since the summer of 1920 but it might as well have been a day. Freshly emerged from a flu pandemic that killed millions worldwide, the...
Column: How am I? Let’s start with the ghost faucet and go from there
I'm considering taking "how are you?" out of rotation as a greeting. Not because I don't care — I do! I really do! — but because I've realized that being...
Column: Shooting, looting and the truth, if you can find it
Just before the Revolutionary War, a Scottish man named Duncan MacVicar moved with his wife and young daughter to what would soon become the United States. They received a land...
Column: Face masks, the death of sacrifice and the ‘Me Only’ movement
Our lives begin with sacrifice. It's the first gift we're given, the first things our mothers bestow: life, at their expense. It's rarer than it used to be that they...
Column: Remember Ralph Elliott, a good man, until someone can make sense of his death
Of all the stories I've reported in my career, one has taken up residence in my soul. I go back again and again to plumb the events of that day,...
Column: It’s not Lives vs. Economy. It’s not Lives vs. School Reopenings. It’s Life, and Death.
Several years ago, when my husband and I were still traveling what would become our achingly long road to parenthood, I had a miscarriage, my second in a row. Hoping...
Column: The joy of quarantine eating
The other day, my husband, my boys and I grabbed our ice cream cones and a few napkins and headed outside for our new summer tradition: dessert on the front...