John McCarron

The last time I saw Jack Kemp, up close, he was on the West Side of Chicago getting a big hug from community activist Gale Cincotta. It was November of...

Surprise. Surprise. The new management team at the Chicago Transit Authority has discovered that the bus-and-train agency is $20 million in the hole and sinking deeper by the day. Surprise....

Cook County property tax bills go into the mail this week, and if you're one of the lucky 1.5 million who'll be opening an envelope, do read on. If you're...

So this is how the Chicago Skyway happened. City, state and federal governments stop talking to each other. Powerful politicians go for short-term advantage over long-term consequences. Pretty soon, before...

Not long before his death in 1972, Saul Alinsky, the godfather of what we now refer to as community groups, was asked about the future of grass-roots organizing. By then...

Do we really have to vote for one of these guys? It's a question heard more and more as the presidential race begins to gear up. You can hear it,...

Here it is, July already, and it has come to my attention that several of you have failed to submit your plans to protest and/or disrupt the Democratic National Convention....

There was a ton of money on display in Chicago last week. You could see it at the grand opening of the new Museum of Contemporary Art, where fundraisers set...

Chicagoans don't pay much attention to the advice of out-of-town visitors. For a cosmopolitan bunch, we're pretty parochial that way. Which is unfortunate, because a thoughtful sojourner can tell us...

Just because I'm a white liberal doesn't mean I'm guilty. Nobody in my family owned slaves. Anything I've been able to scrape together in this world--the job, the mortgage, the...