Flashback 2009: A kernel of truth about risk obsession

     When the history of our current disaster is written — if we still do that sort of thing — I'm sure the Democrats will get their share of blame for being handmaidens to our ruin, between Joe Biden running for a second term despite his clearly being too diminished by age to pull it off and our current tendency to take our eye off the ball and squabble over secondary issues. The Republicans are buffing the golden calf of Donald Trump with their long tresses, fluttering timbrals and singing praise to the liar, bully, fraud and traitor, while the Democrats still can't seem to find their ass with both hands.

     I was looking for last week's lung transplant story when I noticed this. The second item is a sobering reminder that elevating toxic narcissists and self-dealing clowns is unfortunately not a Republican monopoly.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Popcorn is the only food that explodes. The moisture inside the corn kernels gets agitated, by heat or microwave, then blows up and turns the kernels inside out. The result is tasty and fun, the only food you'll sit in the dark and shovel into your face by the cubic foot and not worry about.
     Or try not to worry about. Sure, popcorn has its drawbacks — salt and oil and whatever. Cracking a tooth on an unpopped kernel. But I try not to think about those perils. You can't worry about everything. You have to mark out certain areas in life as worry-free zones, regions whose hazards you blithely ignore, because if you fret about every aspect of existence, then the worry itself gets you.
     So I'm wandering Sunset Foods, just killing time until my wife picks up the groceries, and my attention falls upon a box of "Smart Balance Non-Hydrogenated Light Butter Flavor Deluxe Microwave Popcorn." As if that weren't a mouthful already, a bright orange star on the box proclaims "No Diacetyl added," the word "added" in tiny letters.
     Which of course made me suspect the stuff is just silly with naturally occurring diacetyl and raised the immediate question — all together now! — "What's diacetyl?"
     Diacetyl is a chemical in artificial butter flavor linked to a rare but severe respiratory disease — bronchiolitis obliterans — also known as "popcorn lung." So far it's mostly a concern in popcorn factories; only one consumer has gotten it — some poor Joe who ate two bags of microwave popcorn a day for 10 years.
     But we are a nation obscured with tiny risks, so much so that a popcorn manufacturer would ballyhoo the fact that it doesn't go out of its way to add extra doses of something that might give you an exotic ailment cured only by a lung transplant or death. I'm no big shot marketer, but I would have gone with "tasty and fluffy" in the big orange star and left lung disease out of it.

WHAT ABOUT US, ROLAND?

     A few years back, when a heart-wrenching crime story grabbed the editorial board's attention and sparked outrage, the gears of opinionating would sometimes start to turn.
     At that point one member would snap forward and say something along the lines of, "So, you want the paper to take a position AGAINST murdering children?"
     At least in my own mind. Maybe I just mumbled. But the point is, some things go without saying. This column has turned its attention away from Roland Burris for the past week because no explanation is necessary; the situation is all too apparent.
     Blinded by self-regard, elected by nobody (worse, rejected by voters statewide in his most recent bids for office), Burris clings to his illegitimate power and blathers on about himself — I didn't do wrong; I did not lie; I will be vindicated.
     A reader of mine sometimes cuts out this column, circles every "I" with a red felt tip pen and sends it back. It stings, but also conveys two lessons, one easy and one hard. The easy lesson: use "I" less — it isn't a very colorful word, is it? The second, much tougher lesson: remember that it isn't all about me, that the footprint I'm leaving is tiny and will be washed away by the first wave. I'm only sorry it took me this long to figure that out.
     Then again, Roland Burris is 71, and with him, it's I, I, I all the time. Why can't he talk about us for once? Let's hear him say why the state of Illinois needs him to lead us through this nightmare panorama of crisis over the next two years. How his fellow citizens really are best served by watching the mill wheels of justice slowly grind him into a powder. How the Democratic Party is served by keeping this unelected and unelectable pol in power. Let him deny that almost any random Illinoisan that Gov. Quinn might tap on the shoulder during the lunch rush at Potbelly would become a better senator than Burris is going to be.
     Those are obvious points, in my mind, but sometimes I guess you have to state the obvious.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 23, 2009

Flashback 2012: Chicago museums have military kin covered

     

   This is a fun story from the summer before this blog began. Checking on the family involved, I see Peter Blake retired from the Marines a year after this was written. If you want to know more about Molly Blake, at that time she wrote an essay in the New York Times.

     You may not consider the Thorne Miniature Rooms — those finely detailed dioramas in the basement of the Art Institute — to be one of the more thrilling examples of art to be found in that institution.
     But then you are not the Blake sisters, Helen and Leah, of Yuma, Ariz., who visited there Thursday morning.
     “Pink! Pink! Pink! It’s pink!” enthused Helen, 7, clasping her hands together and bouncing, almost levitating, with excitement in front of the Pennsylvania Drawing Room.
     “Momma, look at that!” Leah, 5½, called to Molly Blake, pointing at another room. “Stairs!” Their home has none, so she identified stairs again and again, with wonder.
     The three were in town visiting Molly’s parents in Westmont. Her husband, Peter, is a Marine Harrier pilot, just returned from a six-month tour in Japan. Right now he’s back at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma.
     Blake and her daughters visited the Art Institute thanks to Blue Star Museums, a program set up two years ago by Blue Star Families, a group that supports military families. Blue Star Museums invites military personnel and their families to visit 1,800 museums across the country, free of charge, between Memorial Day and Labor Day. All they have to do is show their military ID.
     “They’re all over the place,” Molly said.
     In Chicago, the Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, plus 11 smaller museums take part (but not the Museum of Science and Industry or the Field Museum, though the Field admits active-duty military personnel for free year-round).
     “We’re really proud to participate in the program,” said Erin Hogan, Art Institute spokeswoman and herself “a military brat.”
     “My dad was unexpectedly deployed,” she said. “It can be tough on military kids, you move around a lot, especially in the past 10 years. It’s very tough.” Here museums can help. “We see it as a way for families to spend positive and enriching time together.”
     You can never predict what kids will notice at a museum. The Blake girls blew by Grant Wood’s stern couple in “American Gothic” without a glance, then stopped to study the couples dancing in Archibald Motley’s jazzy red Harlem Renaissance “Blues.”
     “They’re about to kiss!” explained Helen.
     The girls are among nearly 2 million family members of our country’s 1.4 million active-duty military personnel. These families face all kinds of trouble stemming from the service of their loved ones. Blue Star Families did a survey of military families and found concern about the effects of deployment on children was cited as their No. 1 worry more often than even post-traumatic stress was mentioned. Families try to stay positive.
     “There are times of stress,” said Molly Blake. “But we’ve worked hard to educate them about why we go through these things and why Peter deployed, and try to instill pride in them. We don’t focus on the negatives. We focus on some of the fun things we do while he was gone.”
     Nor is the stress limited to children. The Harrier is known as the “widow maker,” but Molly says she tries not to worry anymore.
     “I’m used to it by now,” she said. “The ejection seats work really well.”
     The trio took in the Roy Lichtenstein special exhibit, giving his large pop art canvases of cartoon pilots a more literal analysis than the typical art connoisseur might conjure up.
     “Some of the pictures are of military pilots, just like daddy,” said Molly Blake.
     “I don’t get it,” said Helen, of “Seascape,” a 1964 field of blue dots. “It’s art,” her mother said. “You don’t have to get it.”
     This being an art museum, however, some works demanded a certain parental finesse, such as Lichtenstein’s enormous canvas of naked women playing volleyball. “Oh my gosh,” said Molly, quickening her stride. “What are those girls doing?”
     Leah didn’t notice. Helen crinkled her freckled nose and said, “I would never, ever do that.”
     Later, in the Thorne rooms, Leah skipped past Virginia Keep Clark’s oil portrait of a grand, tight-mouthed Mrs. James Ward Thorne, and tossed off an opinion that is perhaps unique in the painting’s 97-year-history.
      “That girl’s pretty!” she said.
     About 300,000 service-member families took advantage of the program this year, and while it is fitting to salute the museums that participate, it’s also appropriate to remember that not enough people even consider the families of the military and what they go through when their loved ones deploy, as Lt. Col. Peter Blake has done five times already.
     The Blue Star Families asked those it surveyed whether they agree with this statement: “The general public does not truly understand or appreciate the sacrifices made by service members and their families.”
     A whopping 95 percent said yes, they do agree, an answer that may shock, but shouldn’t surprise the public. Or it would shock, if they ever paused to think about it.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 22, 2012

I remember liking this photo, with Molly gazing into the glass, and her daughter's reflection
staring back.

Looking for something more current? Try Eric Zorn.

     For many years now I've had fun sparring with Eric Zorn, first of the Tribune, now of The Picayune Sentinel. Our friendship did not preclude him from trying to take advantage of my disability, as this post, written by the man himself, proves:

 

    Well, I guess we know what Neil Steinberg's priorities truly are -- his own comfort rather than the needs of his public. He would rather laze around his comfortable home in a leafy suburban paradise recuperating from surgery on just one shoulder -- what, he can't type with his other hand? -- than meet the needs and expectations of the readers whose attentions have sustained him for decades.
     No, no, we get it. "Every Goddamn Day" is just another broken promise. More fake news. How about "Some Goddamn Days"?
      For intellectual sustenance, amusement, inspiration and guidance during Neil's period of repose, readers will simply have to turn to the archives of The Picayune Sentinel where I deliver on all my promises and produce content even when afflicted by discomfort and anomie.

Bored with re-runs? Return to the present day with John Williams

     Not everything has gone to hell. Weekdays from 10 to 12 and then, after a civilized break for lunch, from 1 to 2 p.m. John Williams still shares his piercing intelligence and big heart via that 50,000 watt blowtorch, WGN 720 AM. I know I've knocked it out of the park in my column when John Williams calls and wants to talk about it. 
     Of course, he agreed to join my media friends wishing me well in my recovery. The floor is yours, John:

     Well…I for one am glad Neil is laid up with — wait for it - “rotator cup surgery.”  So now he can’t hit a tight end over the middle or even type on a lap top.  So he needs to take a couple months off.  Rrrrright.  I’ll never forget the way he thrilled the nation, with his “T” punctuation. 
     

John Williams 

But, assuming this really is legit, and knowing how committed he is to the city and his craft, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt.  And,  I’m going to  take  advantage of the opportunity to plug my radio show and podcast.  Neil regularly guests on both and it is a marvel to see and hear his bright, sharp and often funny remarks.  Should you, his humble reader, be so starved for similar (but not comparable) commentary, I invite you to download The Mincing Rascals podcast, “…the podcast for people who care about Chicago.”  Our July 22 Ep features WGN’s Steve Bertrand, the Picayune Sentinel’s Eric Zorn and award winning journalist turned community activist Marj Halperin. This week we’re taking about the anthem slap at Wrigley Field on Sunday, who should pay — literally pay us — for the smog (Blame Canada!), illegal voters in NJ and explosive….conversation.  NOTE to Chicago Medical providers.  Fix this dude’s turf toe or whatever; keep that might as is.

Tired of this shit? Check out Chicago Public Square

Charlie Meyerson (photo by Todd Bannor)

     This blog owes a lot to former WXRT newsman Charlie Meyerson — it was he who convinced me to send out a morning email link, extending my reach to literally hundreds of readers. When I wrote that I was having surgery, he reached out to say, in essence, "Hey asshole, how'd you fuck yourself up so badly?"
     While I had his attention, I asked if he wanted to use one of the infinity of days I have staring me in the pain-twisted face to plug his own contribution to Chicago's media blogosphere, and he of course snapped at the opportunity, because that is what we do. Take it away, Charlie:

     Consider for a moment the hubris involved in promising to post something to a blog every … goddamned … day—a commitment from someone evidently unable to envision a time when rotator cuff surgery would leave him potentially unable to type for six weeks.
     Dear Reader, I give you Neil Steinberg.
     His lack of foresight has put him in a position to seek the kindness of friends and fans, like me, to slap together something—anything—to fill this space.
     As a survivor of that surgery myself—hey, 20 years ago this summer, after what I sarcastically refer to as my last skiing injury ever—I’m happy to help:
     Going through Steinberg withdrawal? You’ll find fresh news and commentary awaiting you daily (well, almost daily, because I’m not so committed as Neil) via my free email newsletter, Chicago Public Square, which has over the years been acclaimed by the Chicago Reader as the “best free daily roundup in your inbox” and by his and my former colleague Mark Jacob as Chicago’s “smartest daily news aggregation.”
     Me, I just think of it as my honor to share journalism from some of the smartest (and funniest) people tracking news of importance to the Chicago area.
      I look forward to the day when you’ll again have direct access to Neil’s insights—every goddamned day.
      Speedy recovery, sir.

     Do you have a venture you want to ballyhoo? You see how minimal it can be. Send it along and I'll consider posting it, as much as I can consider anything through a fog of narcotics.*

     * Comic exaggeration. The pain ebbed after the second day and I’m getting by on Advil.

Flashback 1998: Entertainment legend dies of heart attack at 82 - Singer's life, style set tone for millions

 

     I had rotator cuff surgery Wednesday, so with my left arm in a sling, I'm going to take a bit of time off to let the repair heal. How long? I don't know. But I know it’s still too soon to park myself in front of the computer for any extended period of time, even typing with my right hand. Luckily, I have a deep bench. I've never posted this before.

      Frank Sinatra, the combative entertainer who always managed to change with the times, from teen singing sensation to motion picture star to jazz balladeer to king of Las Vegas cool, died of a heart attack Thursday at age 82.
     Mr. Sinatra, who had not been seen in public since a heart attack in January, 1997, died at 10:50 p.m. (12:50 a.m. today, Chicago time) at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said his publicist, Susan Reynolds.
     Earlier in the evening, he had been taken to the hospital by ambulance with an unspecified distress. Mr. Sinatra's wife, Barbara, was with him when he died.

      Mr. Sinatra's songs provided the soundtrack for a million lives and loves: "Summer Wind," "One for My Baby," "All the Way" and "Strangers in the Night" to name just a few among too many to mention.

      More than just a popular vocalist, Mr. Sinatra represented a style, the entire laid-back, snap-brim, swinging 1950s of martinis and convertibles.
     Later in life, he came to represent a dark side of top-suite celebrity as well, vexed by constant accusations of arrogant behavior and ties to organized crime, mocked for a lifestyle that suddenly seemed brutal and out-of-date.
     But whether loved or hated, whether raising millions for charity or gambling millions at the baccarat tables, whether helping handicapped children or brawling in hotel restrooms, Mr. Sinatra lived life by his own standards. It was no accident that the song Paul Anka wrote for him was called "My Way."
     Francis Albert Sinatra was born Dec. 12, 1915, in Hoboken, N.J., to Anthony and Natalie Sinatra, a pair of Italian immigrants.
     Without any formal vocal training and unable to read music, he was inspired to try his luck at a singing career after hearing Bing Crosby on the radio. Mr. Sinatra made his debut on Major Bowes' radio amateur show as part of a group called the Hoboken Four.
     While it is often said Mr. Sinatra achieved instant fame, the truth is he struggled for many years before he found success, singing at local roadhouses and on the radio, sometimes for nothing, hoping to attract attention.
     On Feb. 4, 1939, he married his childhood sweetheart, Nancy Barbato. They eventually had three children. That same year, he was hired by Harry James, Benny Goodman's trumpeter, who had started his own band.
     Unhappy with the progress of his career with James, Mr. Sinatra jumped to Tommy Dorsey's band in 1940. He stayed there three years, in the process becoming a singing sensation on a scope unmatched by any other singer in popular culture except, perhaps, Elvis Presley.
     The Sinatra phenomenon began in earnest on Dec. 30, 1942, when he appeared with the Benny Goodman Orchestra at the Paramount Theatre in New York. Mr. Sinatra's publicist hired several teenage girls to sit in the front row and scream and cry and swoon, and they touched off an unprecedented national epidemic of teenage female frenzy at his appearances.
     For the next few years, throngs of as many as 25,000 fans would mob Mr. Sinatra's appearances.
     Five hundred "near-hysterical jitterbugs" were waiting for Mr. Sinatra when he pulled into Chicago's Dearborn Street Station aboard the Santa Fe Chief on March 28, 1944. He tried to flee in a cab, but teenage girls climbed over the hood, roof and running boards until he paused to sign autographs.
     He began recording with Columbia; "You'll Never Know" was an early hit.
     Mr. Sinatra performed in a variety of mid-1940s musical comedies, none memorable, while playing the top places of the day, such as the Hollywood Bowl and the Waldorf-Astoria.
     His first movie of note was "Anchors Aweigh" (1945) with Gene Kelly. He won his first Academy Award for his short patriotic film, "The House I Live In" (1945).
     While the time immediately after the war was big for Mr. Sinatra — his $25,000 take for a week at the Chicago Theatre in 1946 set a record — soon afterward, his career went into a steep decline, beginning with being dropped from his Old Gold radio show in 1947. Although the sponsor cited poor ratings, Mr. Sinatra's tempestuous personal life, including a notorious fistfight outside a club with columnist Lee Mortimer, plus his personal politics, considered radical at the time, did not help.
     Mr. Sinatra bottomed out in the early 1950s. He divorced his first wife in 1951, and, a week later, married film star Ava Gardner. That stormy relationship lasted two years.
     His films of the period were flops, and he had no hit records. The Internal Revenue Service audited him and slapped him with a $90,000 bill for back taxes. He was having trouble with his vocal cords. By 1952, he had no manager or film and recording contracts.
     He revitalized his career through the role of Maggio in "From Here to Eternity," a performance that earned him an Academy Award and put him back on top. He had two hits in 1954, "Three Coins in the Fountain" and "Young at Heart," and a hit album the next year, "Songs for Swingin' Lovers."
     More hit songs — "Love and Marriage," "All the Way" — and more hit movies — "Guys and Dolls," "The Man With the Golden Arm," "Pal Joey" — followed. He recorded a series of jazzy albums for Capitol Records.
     Between marriages, and sometimes during them, Mr. Sinatra was linked romantically with many of the great beauties of his day, including Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Gloria Vanderbilt, Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Juliet Prowse, as well as an endless chain of anonymous actresses and models.
     In the late 1950s, the storied Rat Pack formed around Mr. Sinatra — Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, Shirley MacLaine — and they were to share the stage, and friendships, for decades.
     "Friendship" with Mr. Sinatra was not friendship in the ordinary sense of the word. He was not reluctant to use coercion to keep his friends in line, usually by ousting them from his inner circle..
     Mr. Sinatra was close to politicians for decades, beginning with his having tea with Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was particularly friendly with John F. Kennedy through Rat Pack member Peter Lawford, who was married to Kennedy's sister.
     Mr. Sinatra's song "High Hopes" was Kennedy's campaign song, and Mr. Sinatra arranged the entertainment at Kennedy's inauguration party. The president soon distanced himself from Mr. Sinatra, however, after being warned about rumors of mob ties.
     The allegation that Mr. Sinatra associated with gang figures dogged him, despite his frequent denials.
     Nevertheless, Mr. Sinatra was stripped of his gambling license and forced to sell his stakes in the Sands in Las Vegas and the Cal-Neva Lodge, a Lake Tahoe casino, because he allowed mob boss Sam Giancana to reside there in a chalet.
     "Sinatra hobnobs with the Mafia's elite," the Wall Street Journal wrote in 1968 — an article that scotched Mr. Sinatra's plans to take an active role in the presidential campaign of Hubert Humphrey.
     Mr. Sinatra was forced to appear before a grand jury in New Jersey in 1970 after his name turned up on FBI wiretapping tapes of gangland figures.
     He was vindicated at least once in court, receiving substantial damages from the British Broadcasting Corp. for suggesting in a telecast that he used mob connections to land his career-saving role in "From Here to Eternity."
     The Vegas scene became his refuge from media scrutiny and the culture-shattering arrival of rock 'n' roll. Mr. Sinatra had only one No. 1 hit in the 1960s — "Strangers in the Night" (1966).
     Mob allegations were not the only kind of trouble that followed Mr. Sinatra. He was a pampered brawler used to getting his own way immediately, and there were countless incidents, from an elderly waiter being roughed up for getting a meal order wrong to a casino owner being threatened.
     Usually everything was hushed up, but occasionally there were repercussions. Mr. Sinatra lost his two front teeth when he was hit in the mouth by a Sands Hotel manager in 1967, after which he ended his 16-year association with the hotel, moving to Caesars Palace.
     The normally reserved Prince Charles, upon meeting Mr. Sinatra in 1974, described his entourage as "goons, creeps and Mafia types."
     In 1966, Mr. Sinatra wed 21-year-old Mia Farrow, but their stormy marriage lasted less than two years, breaking up when the filming of "Rosemary's Baby" interfered with a movie Mr. Sinatra wanted to do with his wife.
     Mr. Sinatra announced the first of several retirements in 1971. He returned — partly at the prompting of President Richard Nixon — in 1973, with the album "Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back," which rose to No. 13.
     Mr. Sinatra constantly battled the press — most famously in 1974, when his tour of Australia was interrupted and nearly scuttled after the first show, during which he called the Australian press corps "pimps" "whores," "fags" and "buck-and-a-half hookers."
     He found himself stranded: Stagehands announced they would refuse to work any more shows; three Australian unions refused to fuel his private jet; even the staff of his hotel, the Southern Cross in Melbourne, would not serve him. Delicate negotiations with the Australian unions permitted the tour to continue, though one show had to be canceled.
     Mr. Sinatra got married for a fourth and final time in July, 1976, to Barbara Jane Marx, the ex-wife of comedian Zeppo Marx.
     He had another hit in 1980, with "New York, New York," which became something of an anthem for him, and released a popular three-album set, "Trilogy," that year.
     In 1985, he received the Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan, who had persuaded Mr. Sinatra to switch to the Republican Party 15 years earlier.
     In September, 1986, Mr. Sinatra reopened the Chicago Theatre with several concerts. He continued to tour throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and was always popular, though critics agreed his voice sometimes showed the ravages of time.
     Mr. Sinatra was an insomniac who would commission a jet and fly to Las Vegas for the evening, returning at dawn.
     "I'm for anything that gets you through the night," he once said, "be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel's."
     Survivors include his wife and three children, Frank Jr., Nancy and Tina.
     A private funeral was planned, his publicist said.

         — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 15, 1998

Flashback 2011: Potter’s field burial not so lonely after all

Homewood Memorial Gardens

     I'm recovering from surgery, so we're raiding the archive until I'm back in the saddle.

     Death isn't my beat, but you can't work for 39 years at a newspaper and not encounter it, whether watching a body being pulled from the river, the medical examiner performing autopsies on Harrison Street, or Loyola medical students studying cadavers at a gross pathology class. This emerged from that last story, a potter's field burial. Mitch Dudak quoted the story at the end of June in a fine obituary of Tim Kowalski, mortuary science teacher, and I realized I'd never posted it here. And as a reminder pulling one thread leads to another, it was wandering around the Homewood cemetery that I happened upon the grave of the "Martyr to Radio."

     A boxy U-Haul truck wends its way slowly along the curving roadway of Homewood Memorial Gardens, to a group waiting by a large, shallow hole in a section of the cemetery known as The Garden of the Good Samaritan No. 11. The sun is bright, the sky blue, a pleasant day for November.
     The truck backs up to the lip of the hole. The rear door opens to reveal 24 plywood coffins. A corrugated metal ramp is run from the truck into the pit.
     A smell rolls out that I’ve come to think of as “refrigerated death,” a queasy blend of meat and bleach. The bodies are fresh from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office on Harrison.
     Last month I wrote a column contrasting the dignified ceremony that Loyola conducts for its medical school cadavers, complete with poems, prayers and priests, with what I imagined to be the lonely burial at potter’s field: “the sack shrouded body is tossed into a pit with a minimum of fuss.”
     Even as I typed those words, it struck me: I had overstepped what I actually knew and launched into speculation — dangerous for a journalist — and if I was going to comment on this, I had better go see what I was talking about.
     The burials are conducted monthly. These two dozen bodies had arrived at the morgue in July, and their relatives either couldn’t be found or refused to pay for a funeral. The medical examiner, Dr. Nancy Jones, wants to donate such unclaimed bodies to science, both to fill the shortage of medical cadavers and save the county the $289 per coffin paid to Homewood. But there was a public outcry, and such donations have been temporarily suspended while she re-evaluates the procedures.
     The hole is shallow, about 3 feet. Homewood is built upon stone; anything deeper must be jackhammered out of rock. Illinois law requires only 18 inches of earth over a coffin; to comply, the soil is mounded on graves.
     Four gravediggers — Adam Springer, Michael Scott, Gregory Blackshire and Eli Martinez, who wears a kerchief over his face to ward off the smell — muscle the pine boxes down the ramp, aided by four students from the Worsham College of Mortuary Science, in Wheeling — Chris Nelson, Nikkia Brown, Addie Cassidy and Darrell Randolph, who wears a nice suit for this dirty job, which earns them extra credit. Some of the coffins are very heavy — corpses are fatter nowadays. The coffins in the truck are leaking.
     “We do wash it out and bleach it,” says Homewood’s Kelly McCarthy.
     The pine boxes squeak, dragged against each other, then rumble down the ramp, splintering as they go. As each is pulled off the truck, a number is read off a small round brass tag.
     “Two ninety-five, got it,” says McCarthy. “Oh yeah, he’s a heavy one,” grunts Scott. “He’s a biggie.”
     In 30 minutes the work is done. The grave diggers, the students, McCarthy, plus someone from the ME’s office, sent to keep an eye on things, gather by the grave containing the remains of 20 men and four women.
     Tim Kowalski, who teaches at Worsham, reads from a black binder.
     “Bless me God,” he begins, then recites the 23rd Psalm: “I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . ”
     “We commend to God the souls of these individuals whose mortal remains lie before us and to commit their bodies to the earth . . . ,” he continues. “We did not know these people. Many things about them will remain always a mystery to us. We do not know what were the circumstances of their lives . . . . Many may have died in poverty. Others might have simply outlived their families. Our beginnings do not know our ends. . . . We do not know any of these things, but one thing we do know, they were human beings, and at the end of their lives they deserve to be treated with respect. Our common humanity demands that these lives should not pass from the earth unremembered.”
     He asks for a moment of silence and, as if on cue, birds chirp. The 24 names and numbers are read aloud. Then we who are not dead return to our lives on this crisp, bright autumn day while the backhoe does its work.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 7, 2011

Flashback 1997: Here's the ugly truth about plastic surgery

"Janie" by Clarity Haynes (National Portrait Gallery)

     I had surgery Wednesday, and while I'm healing thought I'd share some of my surgical stories from over the years. If my surgeon finds himself reading this, rest assured that I have a far more positive view of the medical profession now that I'm carrying around a good-as-new spine, and hip and now, please God, shoulder.

     For a while I was writing a lot of stories about medical procedures. I watched a heart transplant, which was thrilling, and a lung transplant, which was less so, since the patient died.
     I sat in on plastic surgeries: a nose job, a breast lift. I spent 10 hours at the Cook County medical examiner's office observing autopsies. When they brought the baby in, I decided to take a coffee break instead of watching, a decision I'm immensely grateful for today.
     For those eating their morning breakfasts, I'll spare you the details (though there will be some graphic images later, so you might want to finish your poached egg before continuing), other than to say that the procedures were pretty grim viewing.
     Particularly the nose job, which was more than grim, it was grisly. At one point I felt myself about to faint and wanted to retire from the room with my manly decorum intact. "My pen is running out," I lied, slipping toward the door. "I'll be right back; I've got another in my clothes" (I had changed into one of those green hospital scrub suits).
     "Oh, here," said a helpful anesthesiologist, pulling a pen from his pocket and waving it toward me, "you can use mine."
     "No, no, thank you," I said, backing out in to the hall, where I sat for five minutes with my head between my knees. "I need to use my own pen."
     Imagine the comment after I left: "Now there's a strict union for you."
     Of all the procedures I've witnessed — and I'm including the young student podiatrists from Dr. Scholl's College working on the stinking feet of the homeless in a closed room — nothing was as revulsive as a liposuction, a procedure brought back to mind last week by news of a California woman who died after liposuction surgery.
     The California case took place in March, but was just revealed recently. The doctor removed 20 pounds of fat from a woman, who bled to death while the surgeons allegedly did nothing.
     In the 15 years or so it has been performed in this country, liposuction has become an incredibly common procedure — it is the most common form of plastic surgery — and, in my view, testimony to the greed of the medical profession, since it is entirely unnecessary.
     During a liposuction, an aluminum probe — a cannula — is inserted through an incision in the skin into the fatty tissues, which are sucked out by a vacuum pump. It is a very high tech way to lose weight and as sensible as a dentist cleaning your teeth by removing them, scrubbing them down, then putting them back, surgically.
     The official party line on liposuction is that it is used for pockets of fat that can't be reduced through dieting. That's a lot of hooey. The woman whose liposuction I saw was zaftig. She was heavy. Not heavy in certain isolated pockets. Heavy all over. What she needed was to eat less and exercise.
      That's how you lose weight: eating less and exercising. It isn't easy, but it sure is preferable to going under the knife.
     The California woman who died was 150 pounds on a 5-foot-3-inch frame. That isn't isolated pockets. That's fat.
      Liposuction, as the surgeon I watched performing it noted, is "an indelicate procedure." The doctor got that cannula under the woman's skin and really worked it. The table shook. In my memory, the surgeon put his knee on the gurney to get better leverage, but that has to be a phantom of my general revulsion at the procedure.
     "Doesn't that damage nerves?" I asked the surgeon, as he worked up a sweat with the cannula. "Aren't they delicate?"
     "Nah," he said. "The nerves are tough — the cannula just pushes them out of the way."
     Right, I thought. Of course it does. Absolutely.
     I wish the patient could have been awake to see just what was being done to her — the plastic surgeon, laughing and joking as he worked. "This is the schmaltz," he said, holding up a jar of reddish-yellow sludge and using the Yiddish term for "fat."
     Anybody contemplating such surgery should, at the very least, watch it performed first. Don't be satisfied with a film. Get yourself into the operating room. Dieting will suddenly look very attractive. Exercise will take on an appeal it never had before. The pounds will fly off.
     Because I can promise you: Nothing will turn you off to plastic surgery as much as watching it will. A life of obesity seems positively jolly compared with the reality of liposuction. Any elective procedure should first be observed before being considered. I've got a good-size eggplant of a Jewish nose jutting out from my face, but after watching a nose lift, I can honestly say that I wouldn't go through a nose job if my wife and the assembled array of the world's womankind gathered with their arms linked and in unison begged me to.
     Every line I see in the mirror, every new wrinkle and sag, will be a welcome visitor compared with the alternative.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 7, 1997

Flashback 1994: Keeping a last promise.

Michael Thurson before surgery (Photo by Robert A. Davis; used with permission)

     I had rotator cuff surgery Wednesday afternoon, and will have my left arm in a sling for about the next six weeks. As for EGD, it doesn't seem a good idea to park myself in front of the computer right away, even to give you good folks something diverting to read, pecked out with my right hand, or dictated, if I can make that work. 

     Luckily, I have both a deep bench, and the ability to plan ahead. We're going to be reading chestnuts mined from the archive for a few days, and then some of my media pals will pinch hit. My apologies but, heck, you get what you pay for. 

    Regarding today's topic, naturally I first thought of surgery. This is from the days when I worked with the great photographer Robert A. Davis. I still remember the shock of standing in that operating room, learning ... well, you'll see. As for the end, that was all Bob, going the extra mile, a practice that has taken him very far.

     Eloise Heatherly made a promise.
     A registered nurse at Wyler Children's Hospital, she became friends with Michael Thurson, a slight 15-year-old boy with cystic fibrosis, struggling to breathe and looking forward to a better life with a new set of lungs.
     We'll toast with champagne, Heatherly said, when you turn 16.
     Michael was a kid who needed a promise, a reason to look ahead.
     Dragging an oxygen bottle around St. Francis de Sales High
     School, lying on a board while his mother pounded his back to loosen the phlegm that was suffocating him, his average day wasn't a cakewalk.
     It was a long wait for lungs — at 4 feet 6 inches tall and 71 pounds, not many pairs would fit his narrow chest.
     He was already sick, taking treatments at Wyler, when lungs became available after an accident.
     Around midnight Jan. 29, Michael was awakened by a nurse who asked him what his greatest wish was.
     "I want to see Jordan," said the sleepy boy.
     The nurse told him that no, Michael Jordan wasn't here. But his new lungs were on the way.
     "One out of two ain't bad," he said.
     The operation did not go as smoothly as it could have. The lungs were caught in traffic.
     "Where are they now?" a surgeon asked. "Naperville," somebody holding a telephone replied. Two nurses gasped in unison: "Naperville!?!"
     "We probably opened the chest too soon," Dr. Alvaro Montoya said afterward. "We should have waited two more hours."
     But Michael survived the surgery. He clung to life for 10 days.
     "I'm going to wait until I heal, then work out a lot, so I can get better at basketball," he had said.
     Michael Thurson died Feb. 9 from complications following the surgery. He never got the chance to improve his basketball.
     When the news hit his school, students were so upset that classes were dismissed early. The basketball team, for whom Michael was a scorekeeper, wore black bands on their jerseys and headbands reading "Mikey" for the rest of the season.
     Saturday, Michael would have been 16. Heatherly kept her promise.
     Heatherly, Michael's mother, his sisters and a few friends gathered at his grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Calumet City. They took birthday balloons, flowers and, yes, champagne, the good stuff.
     Michael would have loved it.
             — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 30, 1994

A root canal AND rotator cuff surgery? Lucky me.

     My dentist's office called after a routine cleaning and x-ray. Could I, they wondered, come back? Tomorrow. I got the sense if I said, "I can rush over now," they'd have replied. "Good, hurry." It was a matter of tone.
     The news was bad. An enormous cavity, growing hidden beside my upper right wisdom tooth. Maybe even invading the jaw bone. Requiring a root canal and crown. Probably lose the wisdom tooth too.
     "I like how you're so grim," I told the dentist, after he explained the situation. "It shows you care."
     Off to the endodontist. Two hours in the chair for the root canal. Honestly, it didn't hurt — well, my left arm did, quite a lot, fallout from my ripped-up left shoulder. Holding it still for so long. I'd occasionally extend it, taking care not to upset a tray of tools or grope the dental hygienist.
     Then there was the enforced silence. Although, being me, I still tried to speak, with a dental dam plus dental instruments in my mouth. I wanted to tell the endodontist how important Chicago is to the history of fluoridation. The initial experiments held in Evanston in 1946, with Oak Park as the control. Because he's a tooth guy. He'd be interested. Shutting up is an art form I struggle to master.
     But that isn't the most embarrassing part.
     The root canal was the first act. My next step was back to the dentist, to create a crown to go over the afflicted tooth, shaved down to a stump.
     More than three hours in that chair, including the wait while the crown was being sculpted by a high-tech medical printer. When I could speak again, this is what I said:
     "You know what I was thinking for the past two hours? And this will sound like I'm blowing smoke ... but I was thinking about how lucky I am to have access to high quality medical care like this."
     I really said that. And I meant it. Some 100 million Americans don't routinely see a dentist, usually because of the cost. Half the world's population suffers from untreated oral diseases, according to the World Health Organization.
     A reminder. You know what's much worse than a root canal? Not having a root canal.
     Honestly, the root canal/crown was plenty to hone my medical gratitude. But life has a way of laying it on. A couple weeks later, I went to get an MRI on the shoulder that has hurt me since I tripped and fell on a train platform in Portugal. I was hoping the doctor would say it was strained, perhaps prescribe warm healing oils be massaged into the area while listening to whale song.
     Badly torn rotator cuff. Which I could ignore, going to physical therapy, building up the muscles around the torn and useless muscle.
     Or I could have repaired by arthroscopic surgery. Cut a few holes in my arm, poke in a camera, set some anchors in the bone, sew the muscle back in place, out in an hour. Not even a night's stay in the hospital.

To continue reading, click here.

Willis wall covering

     Downtown Chicago is rich in public art. You don't need me to tell you that. The instantly-beloved "Bean" — okay, "Cloud Gate" for you sticklers. Anish Kapoor's mirrored blob of stainless steel in Millennium Park. The artwork it supplanted in Chicago's heart, the rusty baboon/praying mantis — okay, it's really a woman — in Daley Plaza, the only large-scale sculpture by Pablo Picasso, called by locals, with a Chicago directness, "The Picasso."
     Plus all sorts of lesser lights — the orange "Flamingo" in Federal Plaza, which Calder thought was put in the wrong place (he wanted it further from the building). "Miro's Chicago," which also goes by a popular name, versus its official mouthful "The Sun, the Moon and One Star," jammed into a gap between the Cook County Administration Building and the Chicago Temple (and directly across the street from the Picasso — I imagine many lock their eyes on the Picasso and never even notice the Miro). The Chagall mosaics, "Four Seasons" at Chase Tower Plaza.
     So many, I feel fairly confident the above might be new to you.
     It's called "Atmospheric Wave Wall, 2020." Honestly, I walked past it half a dozen times, registering its presence, not being particularly impressed, until I noticed the plaque and saw who created it: Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.
     EGD readers met him in 2020, when I reposted a 2009 column outlining what I called "The Curator Effect." Museum of Contemporary Art director Madeleine Grynsztejn had walked me through their Eliasson exhibit. I'd been impressed, but also wondered if I could recommend it to readers, who would not have the benefit of the MCA director walking them through the challenging artworks — moss stuck to a stone wall; various rooms of light and color. Would they also be impressed?
     I haven't decided what I think of this piece, made of stainless steel tiles coated with enamel. The typical artist's statement on the piece's web page doesn't add much light.
     "Motion is the central principle behind this public artwork, planned especially for Willis Tower," it begins. "The dynamic pattern on the wall is activated by the motion of people walking, driving, or biking past; by the motion of the earth in relation to the sun as light moves across it; and by changes in the season and weather."
     The Sun-Times never mentioned the installation. The Tribune did so in 2022, with the slightest reference in a larger story about Willis Tower's $500 million renovation.
     Have you seen it? What do you think? Valuable addition to Chicago's public art landscape? Or textured wallpaper gone berserk?

    

One bad Apple (update) can spoil the whole week

 

     Apple sneaks into your living room at night and rearranges the furniture.
     In the morning, you come downstairs and see the couch is not where it belongs, the chairs turned facing the wall, the hutch, askew. You go to put your everything back in place, and can't.  The couch is too heavy. The chairs, somehow bolted to the floor. The knicknacks are missing.
     So you call Apple. Together, virtually, you push furniture this way and that. For nearly an hour. But when you're done, the living room is somehow still not right. You could live with it this way. But why should you have to? You want it the way it was.
     Welcome to my week with Apple, a company I've been patronizing with canine devotion for nearly 25 years, since the first sleek lozenge of a iPod came out. You could store lots of music on it. "This makes me proud to be a human being," I'd tell friends, showing it off.

     I own a Macbook Pro, an iPad, two iPod Pros, one old and tinny, one brand new, a iPhone 17. I have two 24-inch iMacs, the one the paper issued me 18 years ago, and a new one, since you can't have one that old. Bought last January. Paid for the extra memory.

     So when a little notice appears that it is time for the Tahoe 26.5.1 update, I do not feel a protective frisson of fear. There was no premonition. I didn't jerk my head to the right, as if hearing a sharp noise. These updates are necessary, for security.I have a brand spankin' new iMac I click my approval and go to bed.

      I awake to a changed world. My screen saver, for years a view of the Grand Canal in Venice, now replaced by some rock strewn aqua lake. The icons on my desktop are not in their familiar disarray, but assembled in neat rows, as if by some sociopath.

     But that isn't the bad part. The bad part is when I open my photos, I find 1,640. Not the 88,000 possessed the day before.

     No problem. Up into iCloud. There they all are. Whew. And I could leave it like that. But clouds blow away. Things happen. I paid extra for the terabyte of memory on my machine because I want the photos at hand, where I can edit them, which you can't do in the cloud. So I begin to download the photos.

     Only they won't go. I get to 10,000 or so, and the thing freezes up. I try various strategies, guided first by AI, then phoning, reaching a very realistic voice. We try this, then that ,then this again. Only it doesn't work. Nothing works.

     Eventually, I 'm passed along to an actual human. Very nice. We work together for another hour. No luck.

      Throughout it all, I tell myself: The photos are in the cloud. Human agency will get them out. On Day Four, another human has me download a new update, 26.5.2. I wonder if it has just been issued to address the nest of bugs caused by the last update.

     So I contact Apple media relations, and that is really why I'm writing this — well, that and to complain.

To continue reading, click here.

This is the crucial moment

      Sure, I watched the president speak on Thursday night.
      How could you not? 

      "This is the historic moment," I told my wife.

      And I wasn't wrong. 

      Still, I haven't commented on it yet.
      And frankly, am not sure why I'm commenting on it now.
      What's there to say?

      It's painfully obvious.
      There's nothing new. 
      The same lies — he won the 2020 election, the Chinese, Joe Biden, blah blah blah. What a crybaby. 
      And argument so flimsy, so transparently fictional, that an ounce of thought puffs the whole thing away.
      But even to take the framework of fact — and I can't take credit for noticing this, but read it on social media and am happy to pass it along — Donald Trump is saying that the election of 2016, the one that took place when Barack Hussein Obama was president, was fair and fine. 

     And the 2024 election, the one that occurred when Joe Biden was in the White House, went off without a hitch.
      But that 2020 election, the one taking place when he, Donald Trump, was president, was utterly corrupt, influenced by Venezuela and China and Russia and the Club of Rome, that was thoroughly rigged. Right under his nose. Yet he, the guy who sat back and did nothing, apparently, in the dark while it occurred, oblivious, clueless, now wants to take full control of the process, ram through all sorts of unprecedented, extensive, illegal action in the four months between now and November to make sure it doesn't happen again.  

     Which, for the record, it can't — happen again — because it never happened in the first place.

     His solution? Throttling Americans' right to vote. Demanding proof of citizenship. Which, in case you don't know, is not on your driver's license. It's on your passport. If you have a passport. And 50 percent of Americans don't. It's on your birth certificate. If you can lay your hands on it.

     Tens of millions of Americans would be disenfranchisted.
     This is the line in the sand. The excess that cannot be ignored, cannot be tolerated, cannot be normalized. All the tariffs and executive orders and Qatari jets were child's play in comparison. This is where it ends. It's him or us. Trump or America. Trump will either be thwarted in his attempt to corrupt the 2026 election — either the states will resist — or democracy will die. Because if you can't vote because ICE thugs are roughing you up, or because you don't have documentation that you never needed before, then voting becomes merely symbolic, a gesture toward the country we once were and now only pretend to be. The traitor has shown his hand, completely. Which, as I said, is no big revelation, because he's been building up to this for years. For a chronic liar, he can be very candid. 

     Enough about him. It's up to us now to accept or reject what he plans to do to this country. But who will rally us? Where is Paul Revere when we need him? Maybe it'll have to be all of us, inspiring ourselves. The stakes couldn't be higher.
      

Smoke gets in your eyes

   

     The air downtown tasted bad on Thursday. I had to go over to police headquarters at 35th and Michigan to pick up my new press credentials — good for getting into museums in Europe, if nothing else — and then decided to go to Navy Pier, to the Sun-Times office, to collect my mail. Followed by lunch at the Cliff Dwellers Club with an old boss.
     How did the air taste, exactly? Part wet campfire, part vinegar. A sour, mineral odor. On John Williams Show on WGN, "brisket" was suggested, prompting me to think, "not my wife's brisket, that's for damn sure. That smells incredible." For a time, the worst quality air of any major city in the world, according to one source. I was grateful that all my public transportation connections were smooth — step out of Union Station, cross Jackson Street, and the 124 bus practically rolled up.
     Huge wildfires in Canada, trapped by a temperature inversion, causing the haze. The new normal, we are told. More fallout from that global warming that doesn't exist, according to Republicans. I tried to smile when posing for my press pass.
     "See you in two years," the police officer running the camera said cheerfully.
     "I won't be here in two years," I replied, perhaps with more glumly than I intended.
     Caught the Green Line north. Waiting on the Bronzeville Platform, the city didn't look particularly hazy. The field at De La Salle High School awaited an infusion of Meteors. Alma mater of both Daley the father and Daley the son.
     Stepped out at Washington and Wabash, walked a little west and the 124 rolled up. Something was going right. I walked through the pier — a colleague greeted me warmly. At the office, I collected my mail, chatted with my bosses, complimented the new managing editor, whom I had taken to lunch — also at Cliff Dwellers — when he showed up, as a kindness. It's hard to show up at a new office, not knowing anybody.

     "I didn't realize I was sucking up to the future managing editor at the time," I said. We laughed. 

     Caught the 124 back to Michigan.
     Cliff Dwellers is not the fanciest club — no Union League, no Casino, no University. But it has a million dollar view, across the street to the Art Institute, north to the Bean. I'd planned on sitting outside, on their big deck. But the windows were white, like we were in a cloud. I should have taken a picture.

     "I usually ask for a table outside..." I said, to the maitre d'. "But today..."
     Waiting for my guest, I did something unusual — went directly into the bathroom and scrubbed the atmosphere off my face. That helped.
      After lunch, I made the mistake of hoofing it 15 minutes down Adams Street to Union Station. It didn't leave me feeling ill, but rather like having smoked the worst cigar in the world. When I read about all the tiny particulate matter in the smoke, I believed it.

Lincoln Park Zoo: lots of people, not so many animals.

     The lion enclosure was empty. The gorillas, gone. The rhino, which can typically be found standing stolidly in the old elephant enclosure, looking like a beast from mythology, was standing somewhere else, out of view.
     My wife and I were strolling the Lincoln Park Zoo late Saturday afternoon, a beautiful day, the zoo crowded. With people, that is. With animals, not so much.
     “Is it me,” I wondered aloud, “or is something missing?”
     We’d seen a scattering of pink flamingos. And that’s about it.
     Suddenly, the animal art the zoo has on display everywhere took on a malign significance — here are the sort of beasts you might see. If they were here. There were plenty of privacy hedges, barriers to keep the crowds back. I knew that while you might want to see animals, animals don’t necessarily want to see you.
     “Maybe because it’s late in the day,” my wife speculated.
     The animals were tired from a long day of flaunting themselves to their endless stream of guests, capering and cavorting. They were resting now, renewing themselves for tomorrow’s efforts. I thought of that Charles Addams cartoon showing a disappointed man and boy at the front door of a zoo, while a bear, ostrich, moose and gorilla exit a side door, the gorilla putting on his hat.
     “Sorry, folks,” the zookeeper says, “we quit at five.”
     One way to find out. I queried the zoo.
     “A somewhat unique feature about Lincoln Park Zoo is the commitment we’ve made to giving all animals in our care the choice and control over where they want to be at any point in the day,” wrote Anna Cieslik, PR and communications manager. “This means that if the weather isn’t great, or if they’re just not feeling like being around people for the time being, they can always retreat to their indoor habitats. As Chicago dives headfirst into the hottest days of the year, as was the case Saturday during the daytime, animals might be choosing to spend more time indoors. While that’s a bummer for someone hoping to see a lion or brown bear, it means they’re receiving the best welfare possible.”

To continue reading, click here.

Publishing news

    Books are old school. I know that. The thing to do, if I wanted to grab the general public by the nose and reach them in volume, is to stare intently at a camera and deliver some brief monologue about philosophy or self-help or a history tidbit about a movie. "Did you know that Steven Spielberg wanted to make a James Bond movie, but the franchise rejected his pitches, so George Lucas...." Then endlessly blast that across Instagram and TikTok and and hope it catches attention over all those 14-year-olds unboxing the latest eye glitter.
     But there are a million guys doing that already. And have been. For years. So I'm a little late.
Besides, I don't want to make little videos hobbyhorsing trivia. I want to write books. Always have, since I was a child and making stabs at little looseleaf books — cartoon narratives, the start of books abandoned after a page.
     Eventually I'd write nine published books, starting in 1992, with a history of college pranks, which I wrote because there wasn't one, and I thought there should be. And ending — I thought until recently — 32 years later, with 2024's book version of this blog, "Every Goddamn Day," which I wrote because the University of Chicago Press asked me to.

      Writing that book was fun. Well, it was work, too, but fun work. They all are. Fun work that I want to do, even though the paycheck is not comparable to what I get writing 795-word newspaper columns. "Every Goddamn Day" got me through COVID, a pole star I could sail toward. When I turned it in, I really did tell my editor, "You don't even have to publish it, I got so much out of just writing the thing."
      Educational, and what I call "a locus of significance." Books linger. People read them. They mean something. To me, and to others, still.

     That said, when I was done, I enjoyed not writing a book for a while. You have so much time on your hands, to work out, fix things around the house.
      But I found myself writing a book again. My mother was dying, I was talking to her about our family, and researching using online sources that weren't available previously. Suddenly I was looking at the ship's manifest recording my grandfather coming to America in 1927. It seemed natural to start setting it down. 
     At the same time, Oct. 7 happened, and suddenly Jews were being demonized again, not for killing Christ, this time, or running the banks and newspapers, or driving a hard bargain, or mongrelizing the race through their support of civil rights, but for having their own nation, one that sometimes does terrible things. Suddenly our existence is a matter of heated debate, even among ourselves. By what right are we here? What are we good for?
     Ooo, I thought. Let me handle that one. So I decided to get off the bench, get some skin in the game. Both for my benefit — I do enjoy writing books — and maybe for the benefit of those who happen upon it.
     Anyway, the work progresses, day by day. The contract is written and being picked over by lawyers, and there was the first announcement Friday, reproduced above. I wanted to not steal their thunder but, now that it is out, I can't resist sharing the news here. I know actually buying a book is a big reach for some people, so I want you all to start saving now. It's coming out in the spring of 2028 and will, let's say, cost $25. So start putting away a dollar a month, and you'll be well-situated to pick up a copy when it becomes available. Believe me, I'll keep you posted.

Marvels fill the skies overhead, even in the suburbs

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy (NASA photo)

     The suburbs have a bad reputation. As endless tracts of anodyne nowhere, sinkholes of boredom and isolation, far from the meaningful lives of richness and significance that are lived by residents of cities. A slur formed after World War II, when cookie-cutter Levittown housing developments crowded out farmers’ fields and young couples swapped their cramped apartments in the teeming, dynamic finger-snapping city for identical contemporary split levels on quarter-acre lots.
     But it isn’t true. Or at least not always true.
     There are wonders aplenty in the suburbs. For instance, my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook has foxes, hawks, owls, its own velodrome, a speed skating culture that produced 20 Olympians, Prairie Grass Cafe, and the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy hovering just above our heads.
     OK, M51 is 31 million light-years away. But you can see it from Northbrook.
     Maybe I should just tell the story.
     Not realizing what splendors we already had at home, my wife and I drove into the city Saturday. She had a taste for the excellent Italian food at Topo Gigio on Wells Street, and we decided to go early and wander around Lincoln Park Zoo.
     The zoo was lovely, but missing a certain vital element — you know, it’s complicated, so we’ll dive into the zoo and what it’s missing on Friday.
     Anyway, after dinner — Topo Gigio let us sit at the table nearly three hours, thank you very much — we headed home, a 40-minute drive. As we turned into Center Avenue, I noticed two dark forms sitting on the sidewalk across from our house. People.
     One doesn’t sit on the sidewalk in the suburbs unless one is 6 years old, and not even then. Particularly not after 10 p.m. I figured this must be young people having a tête-à-tête. I put the car in the garage, went into the house, leashed up Kitty and came out. I gave the couple a wide berth, tracking them out of the corner of my eye. We do have a homeless guy who sometimes sleeps on the bench at Shermer and Walters, but I haven’t seen him lately. Kitty did her business, and on the way back, emboldened, I vectored over.
     “Good evening,” I said. “Everything OK?”

To continue reading, click here.

Bastille Day 2026

Paris Opera House

     During my visits to Paris — and I've only been there three times, I'm no Jack Clark — at some point, while absorbing another tableaux of magnificence, I'll at one point think something along the lines of, "Of course it should have all been blown to flinders fighting off the Germans in 1940." 
     Instead the Wehrmacht rolled in, more or less unopposed.
     Which the Americans held against them — or at least I did — for a very long time. What was Groundskeeper Willie's phrase? Oh yes. "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys."
     That was unfair. Many other nations collapsed in front of the Nazi onslaught at the start of World War II. The fist of totalitarianism can be very strong. Look at the Russian attack hammering Ukraine. A sane nation would have never started the war, or stopped after it became clear that it had become a deadlock. Four years and counting. But Putin, like Trump, enters into bloodshed with barely a thought, and continues it for the same reason. Or rather, due to one, rigid thought: he doesn't want to lose, and one way to keep from being seen as the loser you are is to continue playing after the game is actually over.
     Americans taught the French freedom. I get the sense that, with its king and its royal court and guillotines, people are tempted to place the French Revolution before the American one, with our more modest wigs and homespun fashion. The French Revolution seems older. But we declared independence from royalty on July 4, 1776, and the French didn't manage until Bastille Day — today — July 14,  1789, the storming of the Bastille prison during the French Revolution thirteen years later.
    Now of course, it is Americans who need instruction in what it means to be free. To refuse the seduction of autocracy, of just lying back and letting strongmen roll over us and do their thing. Freedom is not won, or lost, in a moment. Its loss is a long, wearying, frustrating, heartbreaking process. We've been becoming more unfree for years now. Some of us seem to be getting used to it. Or just tired. Or given up hope.
    The president and his family personally made more than $2 billion since the taking of office last year. Mostly from a crypto currency scam. Not a vast personal fortune, on the Elon Musk scale. But enough to want to hold onto. You can see why Trump is so hot to pervert elections so that a Congress that might ask, "Is this legal?" never takes office. 
     And the American people? Well, we aren't happy, except those of us who are, no matter what. Not pleased with this direction. But what are we doing about it? What can be done? Put our faith in the degraded elections, four months away, maybe? Wait for something good to happen? Hope, as the saying goes, is not a strategy. Meanwhile, unlike the French, our own nation's capital was defaced, not resisting the enemies of freedom, but celebrating them. A physical mess mirroring the moral, intellectual, legal, governmental decay we sink deeper and deeper into, day by day. When is our Bastille Day? Certainly not today, not tomorrow, not anytime soon.

    

Is AI going to kill us all? Radio, when new, also seemed a menace

     One hundred years ago last Friday — July 10, 1926 — at 40 minutes after midnight at a frantic South Side jazz age party, Al Katz and his Kittens were playing the Moon Lite Gardens at the Chicago Beach Hotel in Kenwood. The crowd cried out “Valencia! Valencia!” the dance craze of the moment, and with a clatter of castanets, the group swung into the number.
     “Its exotic rhythms sent gilded heels gliding across the glistening floor,” Radio Digest noted, after the tragedy. “Sparkling lights, gleaming shoulders, jeweled fingers, radiant faces, brilliant costumes, spotless linen and fathomless black revolved in a kaleidoscopic array.”
     Twenty miles away in Homewood at the transmitter of radio station WOK, Thornton High School graduate Lester J. Wolf manned the control board, broadcasting the Moon Lite Gardens fun “throughout the Middle West into homes where lonely hearts were hungry for happiness and joy.”
     At 19, Wolf lived at home with his parents and was one of the youngest people in the country to hold a commercial broadcast license.
     Then a fuse blew. The signal went dead. Eager to get the station back on the air, Wolf reached for the faulty connection without first cutting the power and received a 6,000 volt shock. He fell to the floor but quickly stood up and told the studio director he was OK. But Wolf wasn’t OK. A moment later fell to the floor again, dead.
     The Radio Digest called him “the first martyr in the field of broadcasting for public entertaining,” as if there might be many more. It’s hard to tell with a new industry, particularly one based on a terrifyingly lethal technology like electricity, joined to an invisible possible menace such as radio waves.
     People always expect the worse. Radio did have risks — in the early years you had to hook up heavy wet cell lead batteries, basically big boxes of acid.

To continue reading, click here.