The ‘magic’ at Old Town School’s Armitage building
The circle has come full around for the Old Town School of Folk Music. Chicago’s venerable repository for songs of protest movements has become the target of a voluble one....
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Chicago’s legendary Seminary Co-op a perfect fit for Michelle Obama’s first book signing
Tuesday afternoon, a quirky bookstore in an oddball neighborhood will honor one of its members with a book signing. If this is the first time you’re hearing that, don’t bother...
Bomb scares and anti-immigrant rhetoric — in 1919
On May 3, 1919, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis looked down from a window in his chambers as a police detective exploded a bomb that had been removed for safety to...
Harvard admissions may be ‘holistic’ — but are they fair?
On a crisp fall day some 70 years ago, a school buddy and I made a pilgrimage to Evanston. We walked the 11 miles between Albany Park and Northwestern University’s...
The Chicago police officers killed in 1968
On its back side, the old and crinkled glossy print bears a smudged time stamp, "March 26, 1969," and tersely notes that the photograph was taken at "1121 State —...
How Chicago kept its subway plan on track
Chicago's subway debuted 75 years ago with a ribbon-cutting and speechmaking, a parade and a bit of hyperbole contributed by the Tribune. "It is perhaps the most glorified hole in...
Krebiozen: the cancer ‘cure’ that was a fraud
On Jan. 25, 1966, a dozen people entered a jury room in Chicago and began to wrestle with a scientific question that long had bedeviled the medical community: Was a...
In the Trump administration is there one Deep Throat — or 100?
Donald Trump has steadily trimmed his list of likely suspects since a self-proclaimed “senior official” anonymously penned a damning op-ed piece for The New York Times. Maybe it’s the president’s...
Mahalia Jackson, ‘Queen of Gospel’ to Chicago and the world
Mahalia Jackson was seated nearby when Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the podium on Aug. 28, 1963, to address the 250,000 marchers who had come to Washington, D.C.
Beware those who say they know how to solve street crime in Chicago
Let me be honest about my reaction to marchers closing down roads to decry the epidemic of bloodletting on the South and West sides. The protests — including one planned...