Every goddamn day: 06/02/25

     Jim and I rode our bikes over to Wallace Lake to check out a lifeguard, Laura. I can still see her, 16 years old, in her white bathing ...

           The tendency is to throw stuff away. So when I noticed a two-inch tear in the fabric at the collar of a blue pajama top, my first...

        I've carried a phone in my pocket for 23 years, ever since my wife bought me a little Nokia flip phone for my 42nd birthday. A g...

      "We never make mistakes."       A credo for totalitarianism, echoing in my brain like a clanking chain after seeing the late...

  The Maypole, British, 1770s (Metropolitan Museum of Art)       I smiled, reading this after 20 years. I don't think I could quite mana...

Leo Tolstoy      "War and Peace" is a great book.      That might come as a surprise, since most people have only one thought rega...

          Yesterday's column on wanting to keep my Chicago Public Library card was supposed to be a fun ode to libraries. I had not con...