Flashback 1987: Circumcision — The procedure, the controversy

"The circumcision of Christ," by Giuliano Traballesi (Met)

     Circumcision is back in the news, unfortunately, now that Donald Trump's pet psycho, RFK Jr., has tied the practice to autism, through the administration of Tylenol to the wee snipped bairn. It is a subject I have dealt with occasionally, and this weekend I'm disinterring two examples from the dusty past. This story is nearly 40 years old, but nothing has changed. It led to years of squirming, as an unwilling subscriber to the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers' NO-CIRC newsletter, the joys of which I will allude to tomorrow. 

     It is a painful surgery, holding the potential for rare but hideous complications, performed on most men in this country before they are 10 days old. It is usually done without anesthesia and — according to many medical experts — has no medical value whatsoever.
     If the procedure wasn't circumcision, or the removal of the foreskin of the penis, it probably would have died out a long time ago.
     But circumcision holds a special place in our society. It is perhaps our only modern operation that comes with its own cultural baggage — commanded by God in the Bible as a covenant and practiced by Jews and Moslems as part of their religions, it also has, over the years, developed the nonsectarian image of cleanliness and sophistication.
     The traditional medical reasons for circumcision are cleanliness and lower incidence of disease. Circumcision eliminates the need for careful penile hygiene by removing the foreskin, which otherwise would trap skin cells and oil that combine to form a substance known as smegma.
     The diseases associated with uncircumcised males — penile cancer, phimosis, urinary tract infections — while rare as a group, are also eliminated or reduced by circumcision.
     Improved sexual function is one reason given for circumcision, but sexual problems with uncircumcised men are rare and treatable.
     "You occasionally get pain on intercourse," said Dr. Domeena Renshaw, professor of psychiatry at Loyola University Medical Center and director of its Sexual Dysfunction Clinic. Renshaw added that the pain usually occurs only during a man's first experience with sexual activity.
     A more significant problem among uncircumcised men is attributing sexual problems, caused by other factors, to their lack of circumcision.
     "Occasionally, a man of 20 will go to the urologist asking for a circumcision when absolutely nothing is wrong," said Renshaw. "There have been studies in England and Israel, and there is no difference in incident of sexual difficulties. Israelies, with circumcisions, still have premature ejaculations."
      In recent years, the question has been, do the medical benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks of the procedure, which include bleeding, pain, infection and mutilation.
     As far back as 1971, the American Academy of Pediatrics said "no." In a position paper summing up these medical arguments, the AAP concluded there were no valid medical reasons for circumcision, stating that the benefits of circumcision were the same benefits that can be had by good hygiene.
     "Surgery is a rather drastic substitute for soap and water," said Dr. Thomas Sisson, a neonatologist at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. "Cleanliness is the usual rationale given, but that is the weakest excuse."
     Since the mid-1970s, the practice of circumcision among Americans has decreased dramatically. A study of 427,698 infants born in U.S. Army hospitals between 1975 to 1984 saw the rate drop from 85 percent to 70 percent. Illinois Masonic Hospital reports that out of 1,145 males born there last year, only 50.5 percent were circumcised.
     St. Francis Hospital in Evanston reports having 52 percent of its babies circumcised last year (although it should be noted both hospitals serve a considerable Hispanic population, Hispanics being one of the ethnic groups that, as a rule, do not circumcise).
     The most important change in the general medical view of circumcision is the realization that, contrary to what was thought before, the process hurts.
     "For a long time, the general opinion was that the pain of circumcision was brief and relatively minor in the newborn, simply because the newborn's nervous system was relatively undeveloped," said Sisson. "We now know that this is nonsense. They do hurt. The nerves are there. Cutting the skin in order to remove it is a painful procedure. If you ever watched one, babies really scream."
     Several groups have sprung up to combat circumcision, expanding on the medical profession's position that it is a medically unnecessary procedure with the claim that it is also an atrocity.
     "We've only begun to hear from all the men who were devastated by what has been done to them," said Marilyn Milos, director of the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers. "If you want to circumcise your dog, the humane society will be after you, but somehow removing an important, functioning body part of a baby boy is all right."
     "My own concern about it arose when I realized that people had memories of it," said Dr. David Chamberlain, a California psychologist. "I know a couple of professional men who say they still, even as adults, have definite memories of being circumcised, and of course it was not a comfortable or pleasurable experience."
     Indeed, there are at least half a dozen doctors in the country who perform foreskin restorations - processes that, through surgery and other means, restore circumcised foreskins.
     Many parents, however, do not really take the medical pros and cons into account when deciding whether to have a circumcision. Rather, the decision is made on a cosmetic basis, the decision being made so the child will resemble his father, brothers, or friends at school.
     "Of the hundreds of people coming here, desiring to (have their children) be circumcised, I have yet to convince anybody not to have one," said Dr. Mark Zaontz, a pediatric urologist at Children's Memorial Hospital, who said he is opposed to circumcision, but performs them anyway because he feels the procedure is not as damaging as critics claim.
     If you decide to have your child circumcised, here are some guidelines:
     Make provisions beforehand. Some hospitals delegate circumcisions to interns, and while they need to practice on somebody, you probably will not want them honing their technique on your child. Organizations such as NO CIRC have a field day collecting gruesome circumcision mistake stories, most of which are the result of sloppy or incompetent technique. Find a doctor — preferably a pediatric urologist — who has been doing circumcisions for a long time.
     Insist that a local anesthetic be used. While many might question whether men carry with them submerged memories of their circumcisions, nobody questions that the process hurts babies a lot. There is no reason the doctor should not use a local anesthetic to numb the area.
     Take proper care of the circumcised area. A baby's diaper is not precisely the best area for a wound to heal. Making sure the dressing is in place, changing it frequently, and religiously following any other instructions from your doctor to prevent infection.
     If you decide not to have your child circumcised:
     Get information about hygiene. The AAP has an informative pamplet, "Care of the Uncircumcised Penis," that will tell you just about everything you need to know, and should be available from your pediatrician or the hospital. The most important thing to bear in mind is not to forcibly retract the foreskin — it is naturally adhered to the glans of the penis for some time in infants, and will retract later of its own accord.
     Be aware of the possibility of complications. The most common problem is phimosis, which affects between 2 percent and 10 percent of uncircumcised infants. Phimosis is a condition when the foreskin is too tight around the glans to permit an unrestricted flow of urine, causing the urine to back up and balloon out the foreskin. Should phimosis occur, circumcision will be necessary.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 13, 1987

Trump administration's immigrant crime math is for the birds

"Sparrow and Hibiscus"
by Utagawa Hiroshige
(Metropolitan Museum)

     In crazy times, do the math. The circumference of a circle is always 3.14159265 plus a smidgen times the diameter; 2+2 = 4, no matter how the president feels this morning.
     Math might be hard to focus on with Texas soldiers prepping to wander wandering the streets of Chicago, cosplaying an occupying force. Practicing scaring people, so they'll be ready come the 2026 elections.
     But I've been fiddling with numbers. Specifically related to crime, since tamping down immigrant violence is the pretext for bringing in soldiers to help kick them out.
     Looking at numbers underscores the lies we are being fed by the Trump administration. Since I don't want to drown you in figures, and I know MAGA sorts read this and are easily confused, let's consider just two groups: babies and immigrants.
     Republicans love babies. In their constant effort to drag America back to a 1950s Eden that never really existed, they push for more kids.
     Are babies dangerous? Yes, they are. Why? Because they grow up into adults. And how dangerous are U.S.-born adults? According to the CATO Institute, about 1.2% of U.S.-born citizens in their 30s have been incarcerated at some point, compared to 0.6% of immigrants without legal status undocumented immigrants and 0.3% of immigrants with legal status.
     How can that be? In case you have trouble grasping the complex math outlined above, allow me to offer a helpful metaphor.
     Imagine that if you are caught speeding, say going 45 mph in a 35-mph zone, you could be arrested and deported to a country you left as a toddler. You'd drive slower, right? That is the simple explanation for the lower immigrant crime rate. I only wish everybody was, you know, capable of absorbing new facts and altering their opinion based on those facts. I can; it's a beautiful thing.
     So to summarize, while Republicans push having babies and demonize immigrants, it is the babies who'll more likely turn into criminals, at a rate between two and four times the immigrants.
     Why isn't this more generally known? Because our leaders try to frighten us by waving specific cases of immigrant crime, as if that were proof. An example or two is not proof or — warning! foreign language ahead! — as the Germans say, "Eine Schwalbe macht noch keinen Sommer," or "one swallow does not a summer make."
     The phrase scans better in German. Because in English, "swallow" has two meanings. Primarily an action causing something to pass down the throat — either literally, like swallowing gum, or metaphorically, like swallowing a load of hooey because Fox News tells you over and over that it is true. In German, the word for swallow, in the gulp sense, schlucken is very different than swallow in the return-to-Capistrano sense, schwalbe.
      In English, only as an afterthought does "swallow" refer to the bird, and so the confusion that we are obviously prone to can occur. Does "one swallow" refer to ingesting, either food or nonsense; or a member of the family of songbirds with thin, streamlined bodies and long, pointed wings, suited to hunting insects, long-distance migrants who can cover ... ?
     Oops, I said a naughty word, didn't I? "Migrants." My apologies. Please stop gnawing the doorjamb. Although, let's go with that. The avian swallows in Illinois migrate from South America. It's almost as if nature herself dictated dictates immigration as an adaptive plan to encourage survival. Which, spoiler alert, she does.

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A lovely day in the city

Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2025

      I'm not a spot news kind of guy. Not anymore. My years of racing to a breaking story are long past — the paper has kids doing that. I thought of toddling over to Broadview to inject myself into the chaos. Then thought better of it. Judge me harshly if you wish.

     Truth is, most days I don't go into the city. But my pal Tony is not feeling well, so I wanted to visit him at Rush hospital on Wednesday. Since I was venturing downtown, it made sense to go eyeball the supposed war zone that Donald Trump claims demands his sending in the Texas National Guard, already in Illinois and on their way, to do ... God know's what.
     A plan was in order. Search for troops, then troll for ICE. So I patrolled Wacker Drive, from Union Station to the Wrigley Building, hoping to encounter soldiers. Only there weren't any soldiers. Not on North Michigan Avenue, up toward the Water Tower. 
     Realizing I was drawing a blank, I turned around, cued up Gang of Four's "I Love a Man in a Uniform" on iTunes — that seems apt — and headed south, to Lake Street. Not so much as a lone sentry leaning against a rifle. 
     Just lots of tourists of every description on a glorious sunny October day. Which might be itself be news, maybe even important news. The media has an idiot capacity to all look at the same thing, the same block of discord and nowhere else. Don't get me wrong, regular Chicagoans blocking ICE operations in Broadview is significant and needs to be reported, day after day after day. 
      But also important is the rest of the city going about its business in relative peace and harmony. That doesn't seem to get mentioned as much. We need to remember that this is oppression for oppression's sake, a practice crackdown built on lies. The city is fine.
      Onto the Pink Line at the Thompson Center, or whatever Google calls the place now. A quiet ride to 18th Street, scanning the streets for squads of soldiers, or for menacing vans disgorging faceless militias. Nothing.   

     To Panaderia Nuevo Leon, with its quaint glass-doored wooden cabinets.  I took the traditional metal tray and tongs to load up on marranitos — ginger pigs — for myself, and a big bag of sugar cookies, muted pastels and dun browns, shaped like hearts and watermelons and oblongs, for Tony. Or rather —  I suspected, correctly as it turned out— his nurses, important too, as they work long hours, need a steady supply of sweets, and appreciate a good freshly baked cookie. A happy nurse is an attentive nurse.   

    I wanted to ask the two ladies behind the counter, "Are you afraid?" But there was a language issue and, besides, when I asked if I could take their photo, they said no, which itself is an answer.

     Quickstep over to 5 Rabanitos, where I bumped into State Senator Celina Villanueva and exchanged greetings and a few words about The Situation. I urged her to get in touch with me so we can have a formal conversation for the paper. She probably won't. But maybe she will. Stranger things have happened. I'll give her a call today and try to prod the process along. But politicians aren't battering down my door anymore. I'm sure they have their reasons.

     The place was packed, by the way — a good sign. I got what I usually get — the grilled chicken in a garlic honey marinade with vegetables. O...M...G! Initially, I thought I might take half of it home for later, but failed in that intention. 

     Then into the National Museum of Mexican Art — free, as always. There was something new — the doors had "THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY" signs designed to prevent ICE from storming in and arresting the Mona Lupe, the museum's wry rendition of the Mona Lisa by Cesar Augusto Martinez. To be honest, I like it better than the original. You don't look at her through thick lucite in a crowded hall that smells like a high school locker room either. 

     "Carlos Totolero isn't around, is he?" I asked, signing in. The high school teacher who founded the museum and first invited me here, years ago. Otherwise I'm sure that, like most Chicagoans, I'd have never set foot in the place. Just not on the radar, embarrassingly.

     "He comes in sometimes," the receptionist said. "But not today."

     "Well, he can do whatever he wants," I answered. "He's earned it."

"Farmer Skeleton" by Jorge Rosano

      I spent a long time checking out the 39th Day of the Dead show, "A Celebration of Remembrance."  Always colorful and beautiful and especially poignant, keyed toward victims of the Texas and New Mexico floods over the summer. I found myself wishing that ICE could be forced to file through here, the way Eisenhower made the Germans walk through concentration camps. "Look, these as the people you're randomly plucking off the street, you assholes."
     The plan was to walk the 40 minutes to Rush. I started east along 19th Street. High school students were playing on the swings in Harrison Park. A couple fussed over a baby in a carriage. I paused, considered pressing a few questions. "Is ICE worrying you?" I decided against it — heck, ICE is worrying me. And I just didn't want to intrude. They didn't look worried. They looked happy.

     Past the Peter Cooper Public School, just letting out. Lots of security in bright vests shepherding the kids. Pigtailed girls, wearing pastel backpacks dangling small stuffed friends, escorted by a parent or two. One very small girl waved at me, "Hola," she said, smiling. "Hello," I replied, touching my cap, and she echoed it back. "Hello," she said, carefully maybe a little amused, as if trying out the word to see how it sounded in her mouth.

"Mona Lupe,"
 by Cesar Augusto Martinez

     But at Ashland, the No. 9 bus was approaching, and I decided to give the old bones a rest and hop on. People of various races and nationalities go on and off. Nobody shot anyone else. I snaked my hand into the brown paper bag of my private stash and broke off a few chunks of marranito. 
     Tony is in better spirits than I would be, and I'll talk about our conversation another time. I handed the bag of cookies to him, he looked inside, admiringly, then gave it to a nurse, and various nurses over the next hour popped in to thank him for being so considerate. We talked about migratory birds. He shared a friend's poems. I brought him up to speed on the situation at the newspaper.
     An hour passed, and, not wanting to overstay my welcome, I made my exit and popped over to the Blue Line Racine station. Another quiet car of regular folks. I got off at LaSalle, met my wife at her office, first chatting with the guard while waiting for her to sign out and come down. We walked a few blocks west and met our younger son for an early dinner at Bereket Turkish Mediterranean Restaurant, 333 S. Franklin. I'd never been there; our son had birddogged it. Service at the family-owned restaurant was warm and attentive, the kabobs were juicy, and something happened at dessert that literally had never happened to me in a restaurant before. We ordered a square of flan and a chocolate baklava, to share,, and the waitress brought the flan and three baklavah. 
     Oh no, we protested, just the one. We just want to taste it. We tried to make her take the extra two back. That's okay, she said, they're on the house. We tried out baklavah; it was fresh and fantastic — not too sweet. I called the waitress over and insisted we must pay for the three pieces — they were so good, we enjoyed them so much, it was a revelation. 
     "No, it's impossible," she said. "The bill is already made up." We yielded; I tipped 30 percent, and left wondering if that were enough. Our son headed to his car, and my wife and I hit the Metra. 
     Chicago isn't perfect. There is crime and struggle, like every other city on earth. Terrible things are happening now— people are being plucked off the street, families torn apart, immigrants who came here in good faith and worked hard and built lives being victimized out of malice and spite. That's all going on right now, with troops coming to help the grindstones crushing up lives turn more quickly.  We should never lose sight of that.
     But do not let the president's clonic lies poison how we view Chicago. The city is still wonderful. The people are wonderful. The food is wonderful. Protest with all your might. Resist resist resist. And one way to resist is to go about your ordinary business, to still enjoy your life, somehow, and revel in the world they are trying to take away. It's still here.   

"Reinterpretation of a Tumulo," by Alexandro Garcia Nelo (National Museum of Mexican Art)

Patricia Smith, a Chicago poet 'who writes screams'

Patricia Smith

     A great poet forges a world, then invites you in. Open "Leaves of Grass," and Walt Whitman grabs you by the shirt front and draws you down beside him in the sawdust of some 1850s lumberyard. Robert Frost puts you in his sleigh, pausing in a wintry New England forest, watching the flakes fall in frosty silence.
     And Patricia Smith. Having read "The Intentions of Thunder," her selected life's work, plus new poems, published by Scribner last week and named Tuesday as a finalist for the National Book Award, I see her as a kind of heretofore unimagined superhero: WordWoman perhaps. The door explodes off its hinges, and there she is, in cape and purple tights, blasting the reader with her flamethrower of language, leaving us a Wile E. Coyote-shaped pile of crumbling ash, hesitant index finger frozen in air.
     Even the little intros to each section are concise marvels. At her start in 1991, Smith confesses: "She don't know line break. She don't know iamb. She don't know envoi. She knows stage and slam and people's faces when she poems."
     "When she poems." A three-word phrase to pop in your cheek and nurse all day, like a butterscotch candy.
     At least I could. You might draw back, objecting, "poem is NOT a verb!" Then this book is not for you.
     Pity, because you'll miss her heartbreaking evocations of her murdered father, who sired "a daughter who writes screams." Her mother, Annie Pearl Smith, "the sage of Aliceville, Alabama," unimpressed by the moon landing. "My mother saw the stars only as signals for sleep." Smith can pack a lot into a few words.
     Her own maturing, musky self, then a prolonged subterranean journey through the hellscape of America's racial past — and present — that makes Dante's "Inferno" seem like "Pat the Bunny."
     Widely acclaimed ("the greatest living poet," the Guardian wrote, and who is the competition? Billy Collins looking at clouds?), Smith once worked at the Sun-Times, and snatches Chicago, "city of huge shoulders, thief of tongues," away from Carl Sandburg's overlong embrace. The work reflects her raw, slam poetry origins — more menstrual blood here than you'd get from, say, Mary Oliver. There's a surprisingly stark rendition of the Olive Oyl-Bluto-Popeye love triangle that makes me wish Smith strayed far afield more, though I suppose it could be viewed as more sex, displaced onto Miss Oyl, "a stick interrupted by knees."
     The first quarter is mostly fun, which, like all fun, doesn't last. Starting with Hurricane Katrina, Smith serves up a threnody on race that spares nothing: "When a bullet enters the brain, the head explodes ..."
     Being a white guy reading "The Intentions of Thunder" is like crashing a wedding of people you don't know. You sneak in, help yourself to the buffet and the bar, join in the unfamiliar dancing. Then suddenly a funeral breaks out for a child you also don't know. A red-eyed relative leans in and and hotly tells you who's in that coffin and exactly what happened.

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'It can all end today'— Chicago's Israeli consul general on the war in Gaza

Cain killing Abel, by Johann Sadeler (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

I initially declined an invitation to talk with the new Israeli consul general to the Midwest, Elad Strohmayer. Consuls general are not traditionally fonts of valuable information. But Tuesday is the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks that cost 1,200 Israeli lives and the beginning of the war in Gaza that has killed 67,000 Palestinians and spurred a worldwide shift against Israel.

With nations lining up to recognize a Palestinian state, and social media echoing with full-throated condemnation of Israel's continuation of the war, I felt obligated to hear what the nation's officials have to say. This interview was done before President Trump's 20-point peace plan was unveiled, but with talks going on in Egypt now, the Israeli position is even more relevant. Our interview was edited for space and clarity.

Q. What's happening in Gaza? What are you doing?

A. Our goals are very, very simple. We want the hostages back, and we want Hamas to lay down its arms so it would never be able to threaten Israel. ... We cannot end the war knowing that Hamas is still in power or Hamas has the ability to threaten Israel. That's why we're operating in Gaza now.

Q. Why doesn't Hamas surrender? Wouldn't that end the bloodshed?

A. That's a question you need to ask Hamas. The reality is that they have a murderous ideology, and that ideology was known from the start, and they are very, very persistent in sticking to this ideology. They actually care nothing for the life of people in general — Palestinian life, Israeli life, Jewish life. Their murderous ideology is not going anywhere. That's why they're not surrendering. I might not be able to fight their ideology, because ideas are very strong. I just want to make sure that their ideology doesn't have the military power to threaten Israel.

REFLECTIONS ON OCT. 7, TWO YEARS LATER: Crisis in Gaza 'did not start two years ago,' leading local Palestinian activist says

Q. You've got Donald Trump talking about exiling Palestinians from Gaza and building a new Riviera. What's going to happen to the Palestinians?

A. I speak for the Israeli government. I don't speak for President Trump and his administration, but I think his plan is being mischaracterized. He doesn't want to exile all the Palestinians. The reality is we want to have as minimum casualties in Gaza fighting against Hamas. Look at what's happening in Ukraine. Ukrainian people could leave and go to neighboring countries. Why doesn't Egypt allow Palestinians to go into Egypt so we can do what needs to be done to clear Gaza of Hamas? Then anyone who wants to go back can go back. Prime Minister Netanyahu said it: We want to give them the opportunity to leave so they'll be out of harm's way, then anyone who wants to be back can come back. I'm saying this on the record.

Q. Let's talk about the famine.

Yes, there are hungry people in Gaza. It breaks my heart to know there are hungry people in Gaza. But there is no systematic famine in Gaza. That's the campaign against Israel. We made sure from the start that enough humanitarian assistance, enough food, enters into Gaza that there won't be famine in Gaza. But Hamas looted the food, the food was not distributed to the right people, and that's what created hungry people in Gaza. ... I don't want to see hungry people in Gaza. It's not moral, and it's also wrong for Israel. Everybody's talking about the famine in Gaza. But again, nobody talks about the famine of our hostages. ... The famine campaign is false.

Q. Is the two-state solution still viable?

A. A Palestinian state is not relevant at the moment. It's a futile conversation to talk about a Palestinian state, because we need to make sure that if there is going to be, eventually — some political entity — that won't be able to threaten Israel. We're not there yet. They don't recognize Israel as the homeland of all Jews. If we now create a Palestinian state, we have the fear extremists will take over that future so-called Palestinian state and then they will be able to do to central Israel from the West Bank what they did on Oct. 7.

Q. Talk about the PR war. You've got a terror group. You've got America's closest ally, a democracy. Why is public perception so strong against Israel? What you call an "operation" is denounced as genocide.

A. I reject that term. The only one that wants to create a genocide is Hamas. They said that from the beginning. They want to kill all the Jews and throw us to the sea, that there should be no Jewish state. They're the one that tried to commit a genocide Oct. 7. ... The claims that we are committing genocide are preposterous, and they are false. These are lies being spread against Israel. On Oct. 7, Israel was attacked. But also on Oct. 7, an orchestrated campaign against Israel was started worldwide. If we wanted to commit a genocide we would not let humanitarian aid be distributed. We would not let people be notified before the [Israeli military] is going to be striking.

Palestinians are suffering in Gaza. I am not oblivious to their suffering. On the contrary. My heart aches when I see pictures of children suffering. But the reality is, this is the outcome of war. We don't have a good PR. Justice is on our side, but the pictures coming out of Gaza are difficult. I understand. But who's responsible for these pictures? Hamas.

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Fallen angels

"Saint Michael the Archangel" by Andrea della Robbia (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

 

     Tuesday is the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, many young people enjoying a music festival. Plus the 250 Israelis taken hostage, sparking the War in Gaza. About two dozen of those hostages are still being held.

     That the war's subsequent bloodshed has eclipsed the initial horror hardly needs to be said. Very little energy in the world was spent sympathizing with the Israeli loss. Just the opposite. The Palestinians position — that Israel should never have been created in the first place, so any attack upon any Israeli, or any Jew anywhere in the world for that matter, can be rationalized as "resistance" — dominates much of the conversation. Sophomores who won't eat meat out of sympathy for the suffering of animals unquestionably accept that.
     Many Jews, for whom the existence of Israel is woven through their religious liturgy, looked on increasingly aghast as continuing warfare caused the loss of 66,000 Palestinians, a third of them children. Israel's argument — they need to destroy Hamas, the terrorist organization that sparked and continued the war, the elected leadership of Gaza — could not compete with the jarring photographs of grieving mothers and emaciated children. It is rejected in Israel itself, which has been riven by demonstrations against the war. Being a democracy, they allow that. Gaza is not a democracy, and any ill-feeling about Hamas can be lethal to express. Israel's continuation of the war was denounced as genocide, with few observing that if that is indeed the case, it's the rare genocide where the suffering party could end the bloodshed at any time but doesn't.

     Even though I am free to comment on the situation, I generally don't. Mostly because I've expressed myself on the stalemate repeatedly through the years. The situation hardly changes — though the past two years have cranked up the bloodshed by several orders of magnitude — and my position has not changed. I'm against killing. I'm for people living in peace. I want the Palestinians to live free, unencumbered lives. I'm also for Israel, conceptually, as the world's one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of Jews living in a place, a centuries old dilemma where the Jews neighbors periodically decide, vis a vis nothing, that the solution for all their problems is for all these Jews to go live somewhere else. Even if the place they're living is where they've lived for 3,000 years. Even if the people claiming it never lived there, themselves, but believe they ought to inherit it from their displaced ancestors. Every inch of Chicago is also land that was stolen or swindled away from Native Americans. Yet if what Potawatomi remain started shooting up schoolyards, demanding it back, I doubt they'd be received so enthusiastically on campuses across the world. Though maybe I'm being overly optimistic here. 

      Public reaction to the war is an eloquent rationalization for the existence of Israel, as is the world's lip service toward the suffering of the Palestinians. Talk is cheap.
     What else? I wish Benjamin Netanyahu, a self-dealing nationalist cast in the Trump mold, had never been elected. Israelis who feel he cynically prolonged the war to cover himself politically are probably right. I don't know. But my wishes are immaterial here. 
     Attempts at peace since Israeli occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 have been chimeras, and I imagine this latest attempt will vanish in a similar fashion, just another trick of the desert heat. When the conflict eventually ends, it will will end the way all such strifes ends — when one side destroys the other or, as in Northern Ireland, when both sides tire of killing each other and mutually decide to try something different. The lack of creativity applied to this situation is astounding. The Palestinians have two tools: violence and world opinion. Their strategy seems to be to lash out at Israel, then cast Israel's reaction as inexplicable barbarism. Give them credit: it works. The world buys it. Nobody says, "Gee, if the Israeli's are such murderous barbarians, then why do you keep attacking them? Is that a good idea?" Do that, and they sound the liberation buzzer, drowning you out.

     Second, I don't write about this much because the subject is an agony to me. I was raised in the Six Day War era when Israel was bold and smart and beloved. My colleague Bill Mauldin depicted Israel as a spunky sabra soldier, David versus Goliath, threatened by enormous Arab countries. 

    The point of the column at left still holds, though the scale has changed. Just as 9/11 provoked the United States to constrain its own freedom in the name of security, so the Oct. 7 attacks engaged Israel into betraying its humanitarian core. Israel literally lost its mind. The country pull offed feats of intelligence such as the raid on Entebbe. Now they seem brutal and dumb — the exploding pager piece-de-resistance notwithstanding. That was brilliant. 

     Otherwise, that seems part of a past as distant as the United States when it was a force for good, at home and abroad, not twin giants of oligarchy and authoritarianism, supporting each other, growing in power and recklessness, to howls of approval from a mob too stupid to realize that, when laws and norms are simply cast aside, they could be next, at the tyrant's whim. And even if they aren't, the people who are being abused will be missed. As bad as ICE seems now to Americans who think and feel, it'll feel worse when the strawberries are rotting in the fields. Even the Germans eventually had reasons to regret banishing all those Jewish physicists, who happily developed the atomic bomb for the Americans.

     You can support a country without approving what it is doing right now — every Democrat knows that. Love of what America represents, what it has been and might yet be again, is only strengthened seeing how easily millions would trash it all for nothing. Love of what Israel represents — a safe homeland for Jews, one that has a quarter of its population non-Jews, living in peace, generally. That said, Israel has similarly gone down a dark path — Netanyahu left the door open for the Oct. 7 attacks, and his rage against the Palestinians that Hamas hides behind is neither smart nor will it be effective, except for perhaps, finally, pushing all involved to push for a solution which, now that I say it, strikes me as the most extreme optimism.

     Sunday's blog post was about mourning my mother and my cousin, and I've already strayed too far into politics — I'm doing it here because I have no Monday column in the paper, having chosen to interview the new Israeli consul general to the Midwest, slated to run in the Sun-Times Tuesday, on the anniversary. The war is such baffling folly, to me, that I wanted to hear an Israeli official try to explain it. I hope you'll read that in the paper tomorrow. 

    Until then, I just want to draw attention to all the lives lost, on both side. I had a niece in Israel Oct. 7, a bright young rabbi little different from those slain. I see her, I think of them.

    And when I'm holding my new granddaughter, and she cries because she's hungry, I extend my hand for a bottle and someone quickly hands one to me. Even a few seconds are frustrating. But during that wait, it often occurs to me how horrible it would be to be holding a baby in some Gazan ruin with no bottle to give her and none coming. I don't see how anyone of any stripe can accept that. When I was talking to the consul general last week, I pointed out that the situation in Gaza was the sort of disaster that Israelis used to pride themselves in leaping to help fix, publicizing the teams they rush in to respond to every earthquake and tsunami, all over the world. Yet this one is done by them for purposes which they insist are rational.

     I don't like politics because it isn't real. You can't hold politics, or touch it. It's important, but notional. People are real. They can suffer, and be lost, and be missed, and grieved. We need to focus more on that, and the politics will unravel themselves. 

     The bas relief above is "Saint Michael the Archangel" by Andrea della Robbia. Crafted of glazed terra cotta about 1475, in 2008 it inexplicably fell from the wall above a doorway at 
Metropolitan Museum of Art and shattered on the stone floor. It took years to meticulously reconstruct the artwork and return it to public view, in 2016.
     The consul general mentioned a Jewish value, tikun olam, repairing the world. Not everything can be fixed — the dead stay dead, the traumatized might never heal, the past can be hidden, or distorted, but never altered. Yet fixing the world today, despite the horror and loss, is always an option. Working to make something better than this. It's hard work, far harder than blame and condemnation. But not impossible, unless you never even start. I truly believe there has been enough breaking stuff. It's long past time to start trying to fix things. 

"Like the generations of leaves..."

      My wife and I, along with her sister and brother-in-law, went to Starved Rock on Wednesday for Yom Kippur. We've done so once before in the past, but not recently. The park, two hours southwest of Chicago, has a certain serene glory that goes well with the solemn holy day of repentance. And you don't have to dress up.
     We picked a quiet spot in a canyon to perform a yitzkor service — a memorial for the dead. I lost two of the most important people in my life this summer — my mother died June 21. I said the mourner's kaddish for her the night before, at Kol Nidre, where we unexpectedly — for me, anyway — found ourselves at a small, century-old synagogue in Utica. I'll write about that later.  
     My cousin Harry died Aug. 31, so I said kaddish for him. I don't hold many rituals to heart, but a loved one dies, you're supposed to say kaddish — a prayer that never mentions death, but celebrates the greatness of God — for them. Because ... well, it's what you're supposed to do. Because, I guess, you die, you want someone to notice, and to do something, and saying kaddish is both.
     Two quotes came to me. The first one was a snippet of verse from the back of some reconstructionist prayer book that I read, flipping through the pages in some previous hours-long service, waiting for it to end. We have the book, and while I went looking for it before the trip, I couldn't find the lines, which didn't matter, because I knew them. In a passage about lost parents it said, "once we were their dream, now they are ours." Or words to that effect. I liked that.
     The second quote came to me standing in the canyon at Starved Rock, looking at the ground, which was surprisingly covered with maples leaves — brown and dry, from last year. "As a generation of leaves, so is that of men" Homer writes in the Iliad.

     We finished our ad hoc yizkor service, hiked around a bit, and I found myself in different canyon, where the leaves were oak, not maple. Maples are pretty sturdy, but oaks are even more long-lasting magnificent. It occurred to me that the leaves fall and die, but the tree remains. Our loved ones fall and die, but we remain. Then we too fall and die, but life — the tree — remains. Judaism is big on the "tree of life." I never quite got it before. Now I do.
     Later I went looking for the exact Homer quote.
     Book Six, lines 146-149. The original Greek:

Οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
φύλλα τὰ μέν τ’ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ’ ὕλη
τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ’ ἐπιγίγνεται ὥρη·
ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ’ ἀπολήγει.

     A 1990 translation by Robert Fagles puts is this way:

Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.

    I'm okay with that. Which is good, because I have to be, and if I weren't okay with it — which sometimes I'm not — it would still be exactly the same.

Mixed message

Starved Rock State Park, Oct. 1, 2025.

     My first instinct was to simply post this photo without comment. Let the headline be the punchline.

     But that seemed perhaps a touch too wry, for the matter at hand. Death by falling is a perennial problem at Starved Rock, whose dramatic precipices make it a place of beauty and danger. Accidentally and intentionally. In 2022 the Operation Disrupt Signs went up, in Starved Rock and 16 other locations around the state. But the signs — which are not just at this overlook — did not prevent two people from committing suicide at Starved Rock in 2024. 

    So I thought a few words were in order. The boardwalk helps a lot — stay on the wooden paths, behind the rails, and you won't slide off any precipices. Not unconstrained nature in the usual sense, not the deeply-ravined woods you got in the pre-boardwalk days — which I remember, scarily, and not just out of fear of falling. But better to stay on the pre-approved route than boldly forge your own path off a cliff.
    I was mildly curious as to whether there was any history to this "Lover's Leap" — I assume it's a common mythic local place name, like "Dead Man's Curve," and is a reflection of danger more than any association with specific death. None presented itself to me but, then again, I didn't look that hard. This is one of those moments in our nation's history when to reflect on anything other than gathering doom feels terribly beside the point. Twiddling your thumbs on a sinking ship. I'm not a believer in leaping to one's death. Life is but the once, and we should all tough it out, no matter the hardships of our public or private conditions. But I understand why people do it. 

Survivor's plate

 

     The problem with vanity license plates is that, typically, they're more vain than clever. "CAR4MOM" or "VROOOM" or whatever. I can't recall seeing one and thinking, "'Yes! That's very cool."
     Which sums up my thinking when I saw this plate in the parking lot of a trailhead at Starved Rock State Park on Thursday. While I've never had a mammogram, the process has been described to me well enough to know exactly what "Smush" refers to, and in case there were any question, the plate has the pink ribbon of breast cancer prominently displayed.
     As I was admiring the plate, the owner arrived, and seemed nonplussed to find a stranger examining her car closely. That's the beauty of surviving an ordeal — you tend not to sweat the small stuff.
    Karen Aldworth, of Shorewood, laughed when I asked if I could take her photo and told her the name of the blog I intended to post it on.  She said yes but, being a thorough, considerate sort, I explained that once a thing goes online, you never know how people might react.

     "I don't care!" she exuded. That's the beauty of...well, you get the point. She explained the process behind coming up with the plate.
    "I thought,'breast cancer survivor,'" she said, of herself. "It's a mammogram plate. I wanted something to go along with a mammogram plate."
     "You immediately know what you mean," I said, citing the mark of good writing. 
    "You do!" she said. "Men and women both know what I mean." 

    And she was was gone, off into the woods, hiking briskly.
     

Boxed in

    My older son moved to a place without grocery stores, Well, there must be some somewhere, but none within walking distance, and he doesn't own a car.
     Which is not the problem you might think it is — okay, not the problem I might have thought it could be — because he gets all his groceries from Amazon. He orders them now, Whole Foods drops them off in an hour. It makes a lot of sense.
     To him. To me, well ... I knew Amazon was there, and knew it owned Whole Foods, but to see it in practice was ... a surprise.  I like going to the grocery store. Ride my bike to Sunset Foods, disconnect the front basket, wear it over my forearm, almost like a purse — almost like Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage." I feel part of something. Almost like I belong.
      My wife orders things from Amazon. "Need anything from Amazon?" she says. I thought hard, then said, tentatively: "You know those gel pens? We don't have any. Some gel pens might be nice. Blue."
     A day or two later, this box showed up. Gel pens! I'm not going to insult you by making the obvious observation, that the volume of the box is 50 times greater than the size of the pens. It would be inefficient to have boxes in more sizes than necessary, and small boxes could get more easily lost. Toss it in a box, deliver the box, recycle the box. Who cares? Not me. No siree.
     I only note these changes, I don't shake my fist. A postman was a member of the community. He checked on shut-ins, collected a cookie at Christmas. Northbrook has a bronze memorial to a beloved mail carrier. The Amazon driver, well, he's in and out, pausing only to snap a picture of the box on your stoop, to wash his hands of it. You could be hanging out the window with a knife in your back and ... well, I don't want to malign out of ignorance. I'm sure plenty of Amazon drivers have burst into burning homes to rescue a baby. At least I hope they have.
     Even that driver, he — or she — is an interregnum. In a few years — five, ten tops — the truck will drive itself, and some drone or little wheeled thing will spurt up your driveway, fling the box at your steps and retreat back to the truck for the next box.
     It really is a very nice pen. But good only for writing things. In a notebook. We all have our limitations. 

'A very sweet guy who had every reason not to be'

Bob Kazel

     Bob Kazel was a gifted writer, a devoted friend, a caring volunteer, an enthusiastic karaoke singer and mentally ill. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when he was 18, and for the next 44 years battled manic depression until he died on Sept. 17.
     "He was a fighter," said Patrick Kennedy, the former congressman who turned his own mental illness and addiction into a platform to encourage others to speak out and fund treatment and research.
     Kazel was born in Chicago — his father, Sidney, an electrical engineer, died in a car accident when Bob was 14. His mother, Beverly, became his steadfast supporter. Kazel was editor of the newspaper at Von Steuben High School and set his sights on the Northwestern Medill School of Journalism.
     "He always wanted to be a journalist," said his older brother Mitch. "When he was under 10, he got a typewriter for his birthday. He immediately started putting out a one-page newsletter of what was going on at home, with headlines like, 'MOM TO MAKE SPAGHETTI.'"
     Kazel got into Northwestern. Then things began to go wrong.
     "I started feeling overwhelmed," he said in "Profiles in Mental Health Courage," a 2024 book Kennedy wrote with journalist Stephen Fried.
     Kazel ended his first semester in the psych ward at Evanston Hospital. He went on lithium and restarted the next year at Medill, where he shined.
     "Oh, my God, he was the best writer at The Daily Northwestern," said Jonathan Eig, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for his biography, "King: A Life." "We had a few Pulitzers come out of that group, but he was the best. Incredibly creative."
     Eig pointed to a story Kazel wrote after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. Kazel rode the L back from a downtown Medill class and pondered the subdued CTA riders.
     "Television,” wrote Kazel, then 22, “a keeper of dreams that had guided them all their lives around the world’s realness, had betrayed their trust and shown them their own nightmares. A glimpse of chaos, of a baffling arbitrariness that they now saw clearly and would try to work out, by themselves.”
     For Kazel, mental illness reflected the same "baffling arbitrariness."
     "Bob took his meds, went to his psychiatrist, took good care of himself, and for periods he could live his life," Fried said. "Then his symptoms would break through."

To continue reading, click here.

A number of readers wrote in to express condolences to me, and I should point out that while Bob was a devoted friend, he wasn't MY devoted friend. I never met him. I wish I had.

Bob Kazel at a 2008 birthday party at the Eig home. 

'Help me write'

     I read my email. Maybe that's old fashioned of me. I do so because a) I am old-fashioned; b) I'm also interested in what people have to say; b) some readers point out mistakes that I can then fix; c) others share interesting opinions, or situations I should be aware of.
     Then I answer my email, often. Because: a) it seems polite; b) sometimes, in crafting an answer, I coin phrases I like that can use later; c) it helps cement my bond with my audience, such as it is.
     Of late, artificial intelligence, as part of its general insertion of its enormous big money bazoo into our lives, has started offering email suggestions to me.
     For instance. Ken W. of Palatine writes:

     "Donald Trump has spent a lot of time lately calling all kinds of smart people 'stupid.' This is particularly rich coming from a guy who has an IQ of 72 and has the reading ability and temperament of the average 6th grader. He may want to be America’s Hitler, but happily he’s nowhere near smart enough despite his self assessment of being a 'stable genius.' He should have gotten the opinions of the other horses first."   

     While I considered a response, I hit "Reply" and my thought process was stalled by seeing a box filled with this hint, light gray, as if being whispered by some computer Cyrano de Bergerac:

     AI was putting words in my mouth, or trying to. And trite words at that — "a way with words" is a cliche, and not my voice. I tried to delete the suggestion, and instead it became regular print, ready for me to click on SEND. I defined and deleted it, then wrote my own answer:

Ken:

What's the truism about Trump? Every accusation is a confession. Thanks for writing.

NS

     My next step was to shut the damn AI email prompt thing off. I put the matter to AI, ironically enough, and got this instruction.

         Believe it or not, I made sense of that — went to the little gear icon, clicked it, and found my way to this.

     I shut the "Smart Reply" off and a few others for good measure, then returned to answering my email.  

     Not that AI gave up. When I go to reply, there is still two little glyphs — a tiny hypocycloid that seems as if it wandered off the old US Steel logo and a little pencil. Plus the plea, "Help me write," a phrase I've never uttered in my life.

     Now, there is no way I'm going to go with my gut and pronounce AI a bubble. I've seen too many dramatic social changes — heck, I remember pundits seriously explaining how restaurants will go out of business unless diners are allowed to smoke in them. Plus all those hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into it — they must know what they're doing, right? I mean, they can't be throwing their money away? Can they? That would be idiocy.
     Then again, put that way, maybe it is a bubble. There sure is a lot of idiocy going around.

     

Next, dyeing the river green will be cast as a terrorist act

 

     Like any small boy, I have a keen eye for both guns and boats. So, of course, I noticed the M240 machine gun mounted at the bow of one of the Coast Guard's Defender patrol boats cruising the Chicago River.
     This was back in the elysium of 2012, when it was a simple matter to invite myself aboard for a lake patrol, checking the fire extinguishers on pleasure boats and seeing just how fast the twin 825-horsepower Detroit Diesel engines could go, powering a pair of Rolls-Royce Waterjets — basically underwater jet engines — with nothing as dinky as propellers necessary.
     The Coast Guard public relations representative at the time was reluctant to tell me the boat's top speed — 40 knots, according to its own website — and one fun aspect of the resulting column was digging up details the Coast Guard flack refused to divulge, citing national security, that were nevertheless ballyhooed online. Small wonder why they never invited me back.
     Fun is the first casualty of authoritarian regimes — as we were reminded when President Donald Trump, through his puppet FCC chairman Brendan Carr, turned an ephemeral Jimmy Kimmel routine into a permanent, maybe important, chapter in American history.
     Not the brightest media strategy. I'm not sure how Trump squares his self-assigned greatness with a furious need to denounce every high school talent show snickering at him. It seems the mark of a deeply insecure individual.
     He should be used to it by now. Mocking would-be tyrants is a patriotic duty. Though aspirant strongmen, unwilling to trust the machinery of democracy to keep them in power for as long as they want, aka forever, try to squelch the rising laughter, often by pushing their power into places it doesn't belong.
     There was an unfunny chill to see U.S. Border Patrol boats cruising the Chicago River on Thursday — well, I didn't see them, myself, I was at the Newberry Library studying French maps of Chicago from 1825, researching a column for next month. But the Sun-Times got pictures.
     Four boats, packed with armed men, slowly cruising the river.
     It has to be funny, too, right? Social media must be awash with memes of brave aquatic centurians patrolling the mean waterways of Kill City, the masses of neon green kayaks and floating tiki bars peddled by celebrants working off their margaritas digitally erased.
     What could the Border Patrol possibly be doing here? Not a lot of immigrants without legal status arriving via the Chicago River — though it's amusing to imagine how that would work.

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Flashback 2011: Borne back ceaselessly into the past

    Every morning I check Facebook memories. It serves up vignettes of the boys at home, and columns I'd forgotten about, such in this enigmatic entry:

    Of course I had to know what headline I was talking about. I went into NewsBank, and found the column below, whose headline is taken from the last line of "The Great Gatsby" — "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
    The column is a reminder that no kindness goes unpunished. I'd thought to write a column celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Book Bin, my local bookstore, and tripped over the fact that the current owner was not the person who started it, an error on my part for sure, with the slight mitigation that she allowed herself to be interviewed on the topic and never said anything to make me think otherewise. Anyway, this is a lot of fun — notice my various descriptions of Northbrook — and I thought it might amuse you on a Sunday.

     Sue Warner has a gold charm bracelet, and on that bracelet is a charm that has a dollar bill tightly folded in a little box, and on that box is engraved "Book Bin 11-11-71." The date she and three other women opened the little book shop in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook, though I’m tempted to start calling it "my many-chambered warren of secrets of Northbrook."
     I met Warner, a resident of the puzzle box of mystery we call Northbrook, after Sunday’s column on the 40th birthday of the Book Bin, juxtaposing its survival against the collapse of the Borders behemoth, also 40. I interviewed Janis Irvine, the store’s current owner but not — as I thickly assumed — its original owner.
     "I started the store," Warner said, claiming that Irvine, who bought the store later, is inclined to sometimes obscure that fact.
     "This is not the first time this has happened in print," she said. "I’ve lived in this town 44 years, there are lot of people who’ve lived in this town for years, and they all get madder than heck at her when she does this. She doesn’t need to do that. . . . People who were there for the original opening, it makes them furious, because she wasn’t even my first employee. If you want to know the truth, for a period of time I didn’t even go in there."
     I should point out that Irvine never claimed to have started the store — I asked what inspired her to enter the book business, but not directly whether she was the founder.
     Every story has two sides, and after I picked my jaw off the floor, I phoned Irvine.
     "Good God, the woman is never going to stop," Irvine said, after I told her why I was calling. "I started working there the next year. I never intended to lie to you or take on another year at the store I started at in 1972."
     Did I mention that the two women were business partners for 20 years? They were.
     The more I dug, the more worried I became. Irvine says she started working at the Book Bin in 1972. So is that true?
     "I was the first one hired in 1973, and worked there 17 years," said Sissie Erinberg, a resident of the hall of mirrors also known as Northbrook. "Janis came in after I was there."
     For the record, the store was unarguably begun by Warner, her old college roommate Judy Rummler, plus Joyce Eddington and Georgeann Butterfield. "We each put in $2,500, got a line of credit from the bank," said Warner.
     And how, I asked Warner — not wanting to repeat my original blunder — did the idea of starting the Book Bin first come to you?
     "If you want to know the truth, my first child was a year old and my husband asked me, ‘What are you going to do now?’ " said Warner. "The question rankled me."
     And that’s how the bookstore got going.
     Or was it?
     "Joyce Eddington was the one who got us together" said Rummler, who now lives in Minneapolis.
     "It was Sue Warner and I," said Georgeann Butterfield, who lives in Connecticut. "We pulled in the other two."
     At this point, rather than engage in full-blown battle over the origins of a humble book shop in the scorpion’s nest of lies known as Northbrook, seeing how I have to live here, at least for a few more years until my two boys are out of high school, and given that stopping by the Book Bin is one of the few remaining pleasures in my life that hasn’t been plucked away by grinning fate, I’m going to draw this matter to a close by declaring all parties innocent. Of course, Janis Irvine would want credit for a store, which, if she did not actually whelp, she certainly weaned, and of course, Warner et al would want their role as the birth mothers recognized.
     No, the fault is entirely mine, for assuming that the woman celebrating the store’s 40th was the same woman who started it, for dangling the apple of credit where I should not have dangled it. A savvier guy wouldn’t have done that. What’s important is that the store is here, now, celebrating its 40th with a party and a 40 percent off sale from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday. And amazingly, Warner, Rummler, Erinberg and myself all plan to be at Irvine’s party.
      "I’ve had a lot of jobs in my lifetime, but the most fun job I ever had was there," said Rummler. "It was a labor of love. The most important thing now is not to hurt the Book Bin. I’m sure it was a misunderstanding."
     "I loved it. I loved opening the boxes of books. I feel very loyal to it," said Erinberg. "She’s done a great job of keeping it open."
     "I’m extremely proud of it, that doesn’t take anything away from them; Janis and [her husband] Lex have done a wonderful job," said Warner. "But I also think the rest of us should be remembered for making it happen."
      And now you have been.

Flashback 2011: Enjoy a local bookstore while you can

Book Bin's old location on Church Street, 2016.

     "Moonstruck" is one of my favorite movies, despite a prominent role played by Nicholas Cage. It's so well-written, with many memorable lines that prove useful in regular life. "Your life is going down the toilet," alas, has been deployed more than once.
     And a useful edict that I considered just last week, while modulating my tone about the Charlie Kirk candlelight vigil — "Don't shit where you live." 
    With that in mind, I've never posted the pair of 2011 columns about my beloved local bookstore, "The Book Bin." Mainly because the second, which I'll post Sunday, caused the then owner to give me a stink eye whenever I walked in, making me feel even more unwelcome than I ordinarily do most places anyway.
     If you don't remember the 2011 columns, you can read this and try to imagine what sparked a firestorm of controversy and recrimination. You can wonder, but you won't hit on it because, to quote a truism not in "Moonstruck," you never see the bullet that hits you.

     Most books are published on Tuesdays, the day when what few bookstores remain put them out on sale, one of those quaint traditions of publishing about to vanish along with the stores themselves.

     Jackie Collins’ 27th novel, Goddess of Vengeance, was one of the books published last Tuesday, and on Wednesday, Dillon Perlow stopped by the Book Bin in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook to pick up the copy the store had tucked away for her.
     “A girl has to have a little light reading,” explained the Glenview woman. She also bought Linwood Barclay’s The Accident on the advice of Nancy Usiak, a Book Bin saleslady.
     As the two books were being rung up, the women talked about what they were reading.
     “I just finished Language of Flowers,” Perlow said.
     “I read Story of a Beautiful Girl,” Usiak replied. “I found it more impactful.”
     “I just loved that one,” Perlow agreed.
     An average day in the life of a small independent bookstore, one with a children’s section with toys in the back, a faux fireplace with comfortable chairs in the front, a store that has been in business for 40 years.
     Meanwhile, in the city, a better-known bookstore, Borders, was marking its 40th birthday, coincidentally, by going out of business. The last day of its last downtown Chicago location, on State Street, was Wednesday.
     “STORE CLOSING — EVERYTHING MUST GO — 90% OFF” read the stark red and yellow signs in the windows of Borders. Inside, the shelves were mostly stripped. The remaining books weren’t worth the match needed to burn them: Leadership and Crisis by Bobby Jindal. Sydney Omarr’s Astrological Guide for You in 2010 and How To Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green.
     Bargain hunters milled around — there was always a crowd at Borders; it was, for those of us so inclined, the place to go, to stroll after dinner and, maybe, pick up a book.
     Obviously not an experience people valued enough, as consumers learned to prefer the undeniable Christmas morning joy of receiving another smiley face Amazon box.
     Borders was founded in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Mich., by brothers Tom and Louis Borders. Their chain steadily expanded until, at its peak, it had more than 500 stores.
      The Book Bin was founded in 1971 by Janis Irvine and her husband Lex.
     Irvine said someone approached her about opening a second store in the late 1970s, but she turned him down — with two stores, she reasoned, she’d always be in the back room, working, and wouldn’t be out front talking with customers about books, the part she loves.
     She has no joy seeing the giant crumble.
     “It really is not satisfying,” she said. “To see any bookstore close breaks my heart.”
     And Borders once was really something.
     “You had to take an examination [in literature] before you could become a salesperson at Borders,” she said. “They were terrific.”
     Large or small, each bookstore that closes, Irvine said, means one less place “where people can go in and exchange ideas and talk about books.”
     Perhaps the most incredible thing about the Book Bin is, though small, it is staffed by four saleswomen, plus a high school clerk.
     “We never sit around reading,” Irvine said, and indeed, as frequently as I stop by, the stock always seems to have changed — Wednesday the new Jackie Kennedy interview book was published, and three copies were already prominently displayed.
     Make no mistake. Books as tangible objects are doomed. In 2011, for the first time, sales of e-books surpassed sales of adult hardback books — Amazon delivers more e-books than paper books. That’ll never change.
     People like to save money, and to do so will ditch human interaction: first telephone operators, then gas station attendants, then bank tellers and now bookstore clerks.
     I try to focus on the advantages. As a guy who once lugged around bricks of Remembrance of Things Past, I appreciate the new technology. But oh those drawbacks: I never would have read Alfred Lansing’s gripping adventure Endurance if a young Adam Brent hadn’t pressed it upon me in his father’s bookstore on Michigan Avenue. Stuart Brent’s is long gone, as is Adam’s shop on Washington Street. Someday they’ll all be gone.
     But not yet. The Book Bin, for one, remains, at 1151 Church St., and on Thursday, it celebrates its 40th birthday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Everything in the store during those hours will be an Amazon-like 40 percent off. There will also be wine and hors d’oeuvres — try getting someone to squirt that into a Kindle along with your e-book.
                — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 18, 2011