For ICE protesters, high-tech punishment for standing up for what's right

     "Social credit" is a bland phrase in English. What does it even mean? The slight rise in status you experience after throwing a party?
     In China, however, the term — 社会信用体 shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì — while also vague, refers to a ranking system used by officialdom to reward or punish citizens based on their behavior. It is not a single score, but an ad hoc, varying assemblage of carrots and sticks the totalitarian government deploys to keep 1.4 billion citizens in line.
     In 2018, then Vice President Mike Pence warned about China’s social credit system.
     "China has built an unparalleled surveillance state, and it’s growing more expansive and intrusive," Pence said. "By 2020, China’s rulers aim to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life — the so-called 'social credit score.' In the words of that program’s official blueprint, it will 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven, while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.'”
     Be a good party member, don't cause trouble, and your score rises. You can rent a bike without a deposit, or get higher placement in a dating app. However, if you complain to co-workers, post snarky comments online about official policies or, Mao forbid, attend a protest, your social mobility score will plummet. Suddenly, you have trouble boarding a train or airplane.
     That echoed ominously with one aspect of the ongoing ICE clashes in Minneapolis. One protester, Nicole Cleland, said in a declaration supporting a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, that ICE agents, whom she did not know, nevertheless called her by name, thanks to facial recognition programs they use. Three days later, she received an email from Homeland Security, saying her membership in Global Entry, designed to speed fliers through TSA airport checkpoints, had been suspended.
     "I travel frequently," wrote Cleland, a director at Target Co. "I am concerned that I may experience other complications while traveling stemming simply from the exercise of my rights." Cleland, 56, had not committed a crime and didn't pose a threat beyond showing up and exercising her Constitutionally protected right to protest a policy which she, and the majority of Americans, find cruel and destructive. President Donald Trump said he was going to go after murderers and rapists. He did not promise to send masked thugs rampaging through Home Depot parking lots, accosting American citizens trying to pick up a cordless drill.
     With cherished freedoms fluttering to earth like maple leaves in a November gale, it might seem odd to focus on this particular bit of oppression. But as horrifying as it is to be shot 10 times for recording something on your phone, most of the general public does not attend protests, so their risk of being murdered by ICE is still low. However, they might post something on Facebook. Or send a text to a colleague. With technology, the ability to oppress increases exponentially. China has an estimated 500 million public surveillance cameras, one for every three people. And while those were of limited use when government drudges had to monitor them, facial recognition software changes all that.

To continue reading, click here.

Dante, love and cheesecake

     

     Valentine's Day looms — a week from Saturday. You've done nothing, of course. It helps to have a plan. For starters, what is Valentine's Day about, anyway?
     Love, right?
     Yes, clearly. All those hearts and flowers. Kind of a a giveaway.
     Of course, you could argue that everything is about love, in one way or another. Sports. War. Success. All mating rituals gone mad. I just finished Prue Shaw's excellent "Dante: The Essential Commedia" and it reminded me that, in Dante's cosmology, love is the essence of belief. Asked — by Saint Peter in heaven, no less — to explain his own personal faith, Dante replies:

     "...I believe in one God,
      sole and eternal, who, himself unmoved,
     moves all the heavens, with love and with desire."

     Love drives the clockwork of the universe, from the beating of our hearts to the whirring of the cosmos. The epic masterpiece has 14,233 lines of terza rima, and — spoiler alert — the last five are:

      "Here my lofty imagination failed
      but, like a wheel revolving evenly,
      already my desire and will were turned
      by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.'

    So saying Valentine's Day is about love doesn't mean much, since everything else is about love too. Maybe Valentine's Day is more about gratitude — thanking the people whom you love and, mirabile dictu, love you back, not only despite who you are, but because of it.

     In the 43 years my wife and I have been an item, I've been famous for nailing Valentine's Day. One year, when we were dating, and had separate apartments, I used my new key to slip in her place while she was away and clean it, top to bottom, as a present. I suppose some gals might be horrified at that, but, given our situation then, she knew it was the perfect present: something thoughtful, that demanded knowledge of the recipient and considerable planning and effort. Plus I was broke, so it was the most elaborate present I could afford.
     And, like all the best gifts, it was kind of a gift to myself, too, since the place clearly needed cleaning. She married me anyway.
     Speaking of love and gratitude, I've always been grateful for the love shown to this blog by Eli's Cheesecake. From the very beginning of Everygoddamnday.com, the classic Chicago dessert ran holiday advertisements here, from Thanksgiving through February.
     Gratitude being important, to me anyway, I felt I should thank them for their support. 
     Over the years, these pieces developed a certain tone of elaborate, almost theatrical appreciation I think of as Cheesecake Hysteria. Such as 2016's "Fight Donald Trump with cheesecake," (its suggestion that you " stock up on Eli's cheesecake now, before the break down of the government affects the package delivery system, or the electrical grid is impacted by a surge in terrorism or from fallout of whatever reckless war or unnecessary international crisis Trump blunders into" grows more on point as the years pass) or 2020's "We will eat the good cold cheesecake, browned by the sun and be men" and 2o19, perhaps the ultimate, "Have you done your duty, cheesecakewise?" with its pointed opening sentence, "Hey, parasite!"

     Maybe because I'm a journalist, and thus supposed to be impartial. Immune to such considerations. I wanted to make sure that the reader clearly understood what was happening — I am being paid and celebrating my benefactor. Sunlight is a disinfectant.

     That said, I still felt guilty. How was I different than any other bought-off hireling? Yes, the cheesecake is great. Yes, I'd eat it anyway. But still. Money changes hands. There is no free lunch.

     Fast forward to the present day. I'm reading "Dante: The Essential Commedia," a unique sort of book, where the author walks the reader through the Commedia's three books: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, providing a running commentary, stopping the action to expound on what is going on. An excellent way to appreciate a book that otherwise can be puzzlingly dense and obscure. I plan to write my Sun-Times column about it Friday.

     At one point, Dante, Virgil — and I suppose we readers too — are heading up Purgatory's mountain, toward Heaven, where Dante will gaze upon the blinding white light glory of God. Angels are flitting about, too quick for Dante to process. A climbing soul introduces himself: 

      "My name was Currado Malaspina
      I'm not the old Currado, but a descendent of his
       the love I felt for my family is purified here."

     Shaw steps in to explain.
     "Dante pays the speaker an elaborate compliment: he has never been in those parts, he says, but the Malaspina family is famous throughout Europe for their courage and their liberality, the two quintessential feudal virtues."
      Dante outlines their renown.

      "The fame that honours our house
       celebrates its lords and celebrates its lands,
       so that even someone who hasn't yet been there knows of them."

     The soul makes a prediction.
     "The shade responds that, before seven years have passed, Dante will experience the family's generosity for himself," Shaw writes. "Dante was the guest of the Malaspina family in the Lunigiana in late 1306, one of the few securely documented sojourns in the early years of his exile. While there he represented the family in peace negotiations with the bishop of Luni. The document that names those involved survives in a local archive. In the time frame of the poem, these events lie in the future. here the poet repays the courtly hospitality of the Malaspina family with generous words, written long after the event."
     Ha. Double ha. So Dante Alighieri, master poet of all time, equal only, perhaps, to Shakespeare, pauses in his epic masterpiece to sing the praises of the house that put him up for a while after Pope Boniface VIII exiled him from Florence and sentenced him to death, should he ever return.

      In exchange for his room in the family estate, and — what? — a few months' worth of meals at the communal table, Dante celebrates the Malaspinas in a work that will circle the globe and remain fresh and current — and in print — for 700 years.
      So it's not just me. 
      I can't tell you how satisfying that is. 
      Between the world wars there was a skillful cartoonist named H.T. Webster who would draw various series of cartoons under a certain theme. "Life's Darkest Moments" and "The Timid Soul" (named Casper Milquetoast," a character that lingered in the culture for quite a while). One series was "The Thrill that Comes Once in a Lifetime" and showed a young man holding a newspaper whose headline reads, "JOE DI MAGGIO LIKES CHICKEN CHOW MEIN."

     "Gee!" he says, cheeks flushed. "I like chicken chow mein too!"

      The almost unnecessary caption, "THE BOY WHO FOUND HE HAD SOMETHING IN COMMON WITH HIS HERO."

      I don't claim to have much in common with Dante — pervasive disappointment, a sense of my own worth not at all in keeping with my current state — but I do know on which side my bread is buttered on. Just like him.

      Oh, I almost forgot. Valentine's Day. Here before you know it. Go online and order your beloved a box of "Be Mine" Baby Eli's cheesecakes, or a Valentine's Red Cherry Vanilla Bean cheesecake. Do it right now, right here, before you forget and it's Feb. 13 and you're jamming yourself into a 7-Eleven to pay $10 for a limp looking single rose. Your long-suffering loved one will be glad you did. You'll be really glad you did. I'll also be glad you did. And Dante, if only he were around, would be glad you did.

     Okay, maybe not. Not a lot made the dour Florentine glad. But one can still hope, another important quality when you find yourself stuck in hell and trying to get out.

     

'Code of silence' no big secret in Chicago, where every cop is well-versed

     How disappointed are you that former Mayor Rahm Emanuel won't be testifying about the Chicago Police Department's notorious "code of silence" in federal court? At least not during a civil trial that starts Monday, stemming from cops bursting into the wrong home in 2018 and driving a woman, her four children and half-naked grandmother outside at gunpoint?
     Yeah, me neither.
     God bless Rahm — his tenure looks better every day. Emanuel didn't give away big chunks of city infrastructure in spectacularly disastrous deals that cost Chicago billions, like his mentor, Rich Daley. Nor did he flounder around in endless paroxysms of maddening, can't-anyone-work-this-crazy-contraption confusion, like his two successors. He should take his eyes off the White House and settle for the consolation prize of being mayor of Chicago, again. All is forgiven.
     But spilling the beans on the CPD code of silence in a speech in 2015 doesn't make him privy to some big state secret. Any cop stuck on the stand could say the same thing, in theory.
     Heck, they could subpoena me. I'd tell 'em. A week after Emanuel revealed the cop “tendency to ignore, deny or, in some cases, cover up the bad actions of a colleague,” I tapped Craig B. Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago, a national expert in police ethics and the guy whose legal clinic got a tip about the existence of dashcam video showing Jason Van Dyke pumping 16 shots into Laquan McDonald.
     Futterman didn't mince words.
     "Chicago is the capital of the code of silence," he said. "If you break with that code, you get crushed."
     Cops will claim they must have each other's backs because no one else will. Thin blue line, yadda yadda, cue the heroic music. You have to count on your partner in that dark alley; your life depends on it. If the public only understood how incredibly difficult being a police officer is, they'd overlook any innocent, in-the-heat-of-the-moment mistake, or years of unchecked sadistic and racist abuse.
     The results speak for themselves. Chicago police shoot more citizens than almost any other department in the U.S., some years grabbing the No. 1 spot, and payouts for wrongful death lawsuits are staggering in a city circling the financial drain: $1.11 billion from 2008 to 2024, according to the Chicago Reporter, with another $300 million piled on in 2025.
     Not only are they expensive, but bad apples make police work harder — solving crimes takes the cooperation of neighborhood residents, who tend to become skittish and quiet if their only experience with police is being abused by them.
     I have to admit my bias here. Forty years of trying to pry anything out the department yap has taught me: The CPD doesn't just have a code of silence about misdeeds. It has a code of silence about everything.

To continue reading, click here.

"Make it be spring"

Natasha

     Margaret Atwood didn't just write "The Handmaid's Tale," you know. She's also a poet — 18 volumes published, as many collections of poetry as she has novels. So today being the 1st of February, I feel permitted to dig out her poem "February," which begins:

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed

    We'll leave the watching hockey to her — Atwood is Canadian, after all, she doesn't have much choice in the matter. The poem — I can't print it in full, but you can read it here, on the Poetry Foundation site — is mostly about the cat, on its surface. Lounging in bed, on her chest,"breathing his breath/of burped-up meat and musty sofas."
    Perfect, right? But of course the poem is much more than that. The cat is a metaphor — plainly stated — for the male aggressiveness that is such a leitmotif through Atwood's writing. 

It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run.

     Can't argue that, not with President Grab-'Em-By-the-Pussy turning impotent geriatric rage into the driver of American policy, foreign and domestic. 
     The poem made me miss our Natasha, who we lost in June, an absence deeply felt — she was 16, and to this day I'll hear a purr-like-sound, or a certain kind of rustle, and look up, expectant, then disappointed. It was the very end, and mercy demanded we put her down. But also a sort of foreshadowing that would look trite in literature, but life has no problem grinding in your face. Natasha's parting was so quickly replaced by other, greater losses — my mother died two days later — that I never even bothered to write about it here before. "My cat died and then my mother and then my cousin Harry and a couple cherished friends" seems straying into bathos. We all got woes. Suck it up, buttercup.

    Atwood ends by beautifully capturing a situation very familiar to all cat owners, though none of us would think to express it so beautifully, or at all, followed by a directive I plan to repeat daily until April.

Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Atop blog: "February," by Hendrik Meijer (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Quite beautiful

     So Friday morning, busy with research, emails and even a quick nip out to the Bean Bar for coffee with a colleague, slowed toward lunchtime.
     And I thought, "Something for Saturday..."
    At that precise moment, I looked up from my computer screen, at the snow just cascading down, the sky filled with big fat falling flakes. 
    Wonderstruck, I stood up, went downstairs, and walked outside, to take a few pictures on the front porch. 
    "Have you looked outside?" I asked my wife. "It's quite beautiful."
    "Oh my God!" she cried, looking up from her computer, noticing it for the first time. 
     Then I went to the back porch, shot more photos — none seemed to capture the magnificence of the sky, filled with slow. Maybe you needed the motion, or the shockingly cold air, despite which, I had the presence of mind to tip my head back and catch a few snowflakes on my tongue. I'd hate to let a winter pass and not do that. 
     The magic of nature is, it resets us. Snow squalled majestically from the sky for 100 million years before people showed up and deemed it majestic. It cares nothing for our social media or our would-be king. It will fall long after we are done making a hash of things, and go to our final resting places. A good thing to notice it, and appreciate it, while we can, before then.

Minneapolis ICE killings the latest shocks in a haystack of last straws

Still four rings to go. Virgil and Dante being rowed across the River Styx (Gustave Dore)

     Oh honey.
     You think this is going to be easy?
     That's so cute. Have a seat. Let's talk.
     Yes, President Donald Trump had a bad couple of weeks. Two of the courageous Minnesotans confronting masked ICE thugs were shot dead. On video. From several angles. A 5-year-old in a blue bunny hat was photographed, rigid with terror, being hauled away. ("The worst of the worst..." they said). He's being held at a detention center in Texas now.
     Some portion of the American public, which has been — what? Distracted over the past decade? In a coma for 11 years? — stirred. Suddenly Democratic leaders are talking about shutting down the government until... wait for it... a few more rules are put in place for ICE. They must wear body cameras! And uncover their faces!
     Oh sweetie ... we have rules already. They're called "laws." Once upon a time these laws applied to everyone. Now they're mere tinder used by Trump to set American traditions on fire. Rules and laws don't help if they aren't being enforced. Asking for more is like rushing into a burning house and installing smoke detectors in the blazing rooms.
     Put it this way: the two ICE agents who shot Alex Pretti, they're still not charged with any crime, right? Because last time I checked, murdering a man in cold blood because he's recording you with his iPhone is already a crime. Even if you're a member of a paramilitary goon squad.
     Save the high fives for when that day comes.
     Until then, yes, positive signs. These latest abuses were so blatant that even the Lord of the Lies, rather than doubling down, seemed to pause, go all soft focus. He said something dismissive about guns. Greg Bovino, he of the Peaky Blinders haircut and gruppenfuhrer great coat, was dispatched back to whatever banality-of-evil clerk post he occupied before fate gave him a stage to strut upon.
     The liberal sigh of relief rolled across the land like a spring zephyr. Social media crackled with talk of corners turned. Bless our bleeding hearts, we see the sun rise and imagine the world born anew.
     It's so tempting to speculate: could killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti be the last straw?
     Spoiler alert: no, it's not.
     To believe otherwise, you have to ignore a giant haystack of previous last straws.
     Let's work backward.
     Insisting we must invade Greenland in an opera buffa aping of Vladimir Putin, alienating our closest allies, wasn't the last straw. Tearing down the East Wing of the White House without telling anybody wasn't the last straw. Selling the nation's personal data to Elon Musk wasn't the last straw.
     Do I have to walk you all the way back to "Gulf of America"? And beyond. We watched an insurrection. Live on television. A mob, goaded by the president, storming the Capitol, searching for the vice president to hang, assaulting police officers. Jan. 6 wasn't the last straw. We re-elected him anyway. We bought this. Sending it back is no simple task. Totalitarianism isn't an Amazon sweatshirt you can decide doesn't fit. A little snug around the neck. You can't just stop by Kohl's and return the fascism you rashly bought. Nor is this a one-time purchase; it's a subscription.

To continue reading, click here.

My top ten

 

The Sun-Times took this shot for some kind of promotional campaign that never happened. Yes, I
worried it was affected to take it at the Newberry Library. But one of my rules is: "Be who you are."

     I've written nine books. None of them is a collection of columns. A disappointment to me since, having assembled this list, such a volume would be fun (and easy) to put together. Heck, readers might even enjoy it. But whenever the subject is brought up (always by me) my agent, or whatever editor or publishing type I'm afflicting with my ideas, looks grim, shakes their head, and says the same thing: "Column collections don't sell." Particularly when they're never published. That was true when titans like Mike Royko and Steve Neal walked the earth. It's true now, I suppose. I don't know. I've never had one.

    Oh well, here online, we can do as we please. To mark my 30th anniversary (and yes, this has gone on — well, indulge me. There won't be a 40th) I've put together 10 of my all-time favorite columns over the years. It should really be 30 columns, given the 30th anniversary. But that would be a lot of work, and I can't imagine anyone actually looking at 30. Honestly, I can't imagine anyone looking at 20. Or 10. Or five. Or three. But I do hope you grab one and read it. Such as the one about Eugene O'Neill. My personal pipe dream, that prods me to perhaps work a little harder on these than the average newspaper fodder, is the hope that they might bear re-reading down the line. I like to think I'm right. Though I might be deluded. Like everybody else. Anyway, if you're new to the column, and want to see what pieces I'm most proud of, over the years, these stand out:

1. A great trumpet is 'a thing of beauty, an extension of you' — This is my favorite kind of story, where I pull a thread and see where it leads. In this case, I was visiting my son in Phoenix, and we went to the Museum of Musical Instruments. A fabulous place; think, the Louvre, but for instruments. I went back two more times, eventually noticing that a lot of brass instruments were made in Elkhart, Indiana. Home Conn Selmer. Only 90 miles away. It could have just been a factory visit, but I thought: this story should really begin with somebody playing a trumpet. And who should that person be, ideally? The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Esteban Batallan. Facts make a story, and the fact about a silver bridge from the mouth of previous lead CSO trumpeter Bud Herseth becoming a plate affixed to the bottom of his horn's bell, well, when he told me, I actually turned to look for the studio audience so I could gesture in his direction, raise my eyebrows, and say, "Can you believe that?"

2. ‘Code yellow: Trauma in the emergency room’ Even before I was a columnist, I was interested in medical stories. I remember seeing the photo of a little boy kicking a balloon at a picnic for transplant recipients and thinking, "How do they transplant those kidneys?" I would watch a kidney transplant, heart transplant, lung transplant. Watch autopsies at the morgue and faces being rebuilt. I'm still at it — right now I'm slated to watch brain surgery because, really, how often do you get the chance? Such stories were never dull. Like any other aspect of this job, contacts are important, and for this story, I had to force my way in. Mount Sinai's initial response when I approached was, in essence. "No. No. HIPAA. No. Again no." But I persisted. By the time I was done with them, their CEO was asking me to be her interlocutor at the City Club. And when COVID struck the next year, Ashlee and I could hit the ground running at Mount Sinai because the door had already been kicked open.

3. You can lead a girl to slaw, but you can't make her eat: The story you set out after isn't always the story you write, and it's important to be ready to turn on a dime, scrap your expectations, and go with something else.  Top chef Sarah Stegner, whom I'd been writing about since she headed the Ritz Carlton dining room, is one of the most socially-conscious people I know, and she views coleslaw as an entry drug for salad, and was going to go to my kid's junior high school and teach the cooks there how to make it properly.

      I went expecting a culture clash between the Polish lunch ladies and the James-Beard-award-winning chef. What I didn't realize was a) they'd worked together before and b) I'd meet Lily Jaeger and her friends, the sort of real life that seldom gets into the newspapers. I was so nervous, falling out of the sky to capture quite intimate moments, that I did something I never do — I called her mother, after the fact, to get her permission to run the column. I didn't want her feeling wronged, and wrecking the joy I felt writing it. She went along. My only regret is not assigning a photographer, though, if I had, I might have been fussing over a picture of some sorts, and missed the details caught in this column. 

4. "A wild roller coaster ride through a dark tunnel" — Asking a question, then acting on it are two key skills to being a columnist. Plus thinking of people other than yourself. Three qualities that went into this column, after I sealed up a Cologuard colon cancer detection kit, containing, well, you know, and then had this thought: "Who opens the jar?" Answering the question involved lots of calls and driving 300 miles to Madison and back. But everyone at the paper instantly got what I was doing, and they gave it great play. 

5. "Abandoning our kids, then and now" — Being on the night shift for seven years meant I was working when most of the staff was not, and I became expert at, for instance, rifling through the library and the morgue, where the old newspaper clippings were kept, a place most reporters seldom entered. This column came from a manilla envelope I glimpsed while flipping through the As, "ABANDONED BABIES, 1940s." How could you not look at that? And notice how it isn't just a deep dive into the past — what's the point? — but I bring it up to date, using the past to illuminate the present. Which is what it's for.

6. "Crawl across the floor to me." This column was one of those experiences that gets branded into memory, so to speak. From first hearing about this dominatrix at a family Thanksgiving dinner, and saying, "Now there's a profession you just don't see in the paper much," to standing in front of her dungeon door on Lake Street, hesitating before going in, wondering whether this would break my fragile bond of connection with readers. I decided that I wasn't doing anything I was ashamed of, and if I wrote it correctly, that would be conveyed. I later heard afterward that Lilith felt ill-used, somehow, and I'm sorry for that, as I felt I treated her openly and honestly. I did quiz her mother — an extra step I was proud to take. Maybe she was mad about that.

7. Non-Native-American Guide — Imagine having a skilled journalist and storyteller documenting your kids' lives, from birth. How great would that be? Another columnist would ignore his family completely — not newsworthy — but sharing news was never my goal. Telling a story was.  Though news had a way of creeping in. Notice how this column on my older son's participation in Indian Guide's also captures a moment when the YMCA scrapped the "Indian Guides" name. They're now called the "Adventure Guides."

8. Why restrict child porn but not guns? "The trouble with you Len," Paddy Bauler once said to Hyde Park do-gooder Leon Despres, "is that you think it's on the up-and-up." In a sense, that's my problem too — I think I'm crafting reasoned arguments for reasonable people, not throwing chunks of raw chum into a seething mass of piranha. Which is more or less what I'm doing. This was written as a calm argument about gun control based on the First and Second Amendments. The headline, which I wrote, blandly restates the premise of the piece. What I didn't realize was that a) putting the word "child porn" in your headline makes the algorithms go crazy. b) to people for whom it is impossible to even conceptualize any sort of rational restriction of guns, it's easy to invert that thought into an argument for legalizing child porn. It became one of my most ... I almost said, "read" but that overstates the case ... reacted to columns, by legions of people who never bothered to read it, or anything else, as far as I can tell. 

9. O'Neill's 'Palace of Pipe Dreams'  A newspaper column is a literary form, like Haiku, that demands certain qualities. An element of personality — I write a lot of obituaries, for instance, but they're not about me. My picture isn't generally on them Because they're not columns. A column also should be a certain length — say 500 to 1,000 words. Over the years I've managed to play with the form, now and then. I've written columns in the form of poems, or dialogues, or transcripts. This one I'm particularly proud of — it's an interview with actor Brian Dennehy, written in the form of a play that is also a parody of Eugene O'Neill. 

10. Girl X's mute testimony speaks to heart of agony: Here is another example of playing with the form — in this case, using assistant state's attorney Anita Alvarez reciting. the alphabet as a way to structure the column. If you read it, you'll notice I posted it for my anniversary joining the staff of the paper — anniversaries are big in the journalism world, a peg to hang information that otherwise might seem out-of-left field, and pointless. Which I hope this exercise in nostalgia doesn't seem. Tomorrow we got back to the daily grind of reacting to headlines, assuming they print the column I turned in. I know I've done my job when I worry they won't.