A gentle force in folk music, Chicago musician Michael Smith is dead at 78
Long ago at a Miami coffeehouse, Chicago's Steve Goodman sat in the back, jotting down in the darkness the words to a song being sung by the man onstage. The...
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What do you see in a year on the road with traveling carnivals? A father tells us in ‘American Oz’
Some years ago, a not-so-young and close-to-penniless journalist named Mike Comerford took a trip. It was not his first trip, but it was a long trip, taking him across this...
Column: I went to Media Burn for Studs Terkel, then stumbled on a 1978 documentary about the Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan and Studs Terkel, an odd pairing to be sure. But there it was one recent evening, coming at me not in some nightmarish dream but on...
‘Most Beautiful Thing’ movie is about the lives of Chicagoans who formed the first all-Black high school rowing team
Returning to a movie theater will a treat. For many, it won't matter what is on the screen. But the going-back-to-movie-theater experience will be greatly enhanced if the film you...
Remembering Jay Emerich, one of the giants who made Chicago’s Rush Street
A Saturday night and the corner of Rush Street and Bellevue Place was alive. The streets were closed to traffic but filled with dozens of tables and those were packed...
Highlights from the literary scene, from Nelson Algren to Frederick Douglass to the writers next door
"Algren" has been a project fueled by great passion and maintained by admirable patience. Writer/director Michael Caplan, a professor at Columbia College, began making this film about the life of...
The old man of the river gets a brand new boat for the Wendella fleet
There is a new boat in town, a Water Taxi named for a man who has been on the river for most of his life but who was in Florida...
Chicago writer’s new book is about scams, a Michigan island and the con man who would be king
Great writers deserve great subjects and Miles Harvey, who has proven himself a great writer in two previous books, has found another subject worthy of his skills. His name was...
Sport of rowing is the unlikely escape for a West Side high schooler, who tells his story in a memoir and movie
Many of us see the city's West Side, if we see it at all, as a place of pain, poverty and danger. Some of those who live there do so...
Rosalie Clark, for years City Hall’s host for Chicago, dies at 95
For a woman who rubbed shoulders with a vast and colorful array of celebrities and politicians, Rosalie Clark remained a model of self-effacing charm and unruffled professionalism. As Chicago's director...