Chicago
Story Stream
Is Chicago About to Hit Rock Bottom? November 22, 2024
The Chicago press corps have gathered around a lectern. The city is in crisis. Schools are closed. Garbage is piling up. Government workers are striking. Businesses are fleeing. As cameras flash, the mayor of Chicago, flanked by the governor, makes a...
Only in The New Yorker November 13, 2024
A book bearing the name Dorothy Parker ought to sell, so McNally Editions have been able to offer something interesting this month: a collection of book reviews! No essays or musings, no memoir, nothing that could or should be redone as a short story...
How to Understand the Election Results November 11, 2024
I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about college students reacting to the election, which has made me think about my own college days, which coincided with the 2008 presidential election. This was a pretty happy time for me. No one I knew was terribly i...
Europe’s Music Meritocracy November 04, 2024
A visit earlier this year to two Baroque masterpieces of the Hapsburg Empire—Prague and Vienna—revealed a classical music ecosystem not usually glimpsed from the United States. From the perspective of New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, classical mus...
Summer in Chicago July 04, 2023
I’m guiltier than sin and our apartment is a cave of self-incrimination so I get going. It’s summer now and even in Chicago, this arctic prairie curiosity (fucking lunatic Jean Baptiste Point du Sable chose to settle this place, well good for him, he...
My Curtains, My Radiator April 19, 2023
I moved to Chicago late last summer and spent my first evening alone scrubbing and rescrubbing an old dresser I had found in the basement of my new apartment. It was plastered in dust and cobwebs, and dotted with some small dried-out things that were...
Reimagining Underground Rave Culture April 07, 2023
echno was invented by a group of Black artists from Detroit in the early nineteen-eighties. The scene and the sound globalized rapidly, but as an American subculture early electronic dance music was characterized by a science-fictional Futurism pursu...
American Values Decline with American Community April 06, 2023
The following is a condensed version of "American Values Decline with American Community" by Mark L. Movsesian, published at Law & Liberty.A poll on American values in the Wall Street Journal last month has caused a stir. The poll, which the Journal ...
A.I. Can’t Write My Cat Story April 04, 2023
For a few years, I’ve been trying to write a story about a cat. A.I. will not be able to write this, partly because the story is still inside my imagination and on a few rough pages that were originally drafted in Boston, on sheets of notebook paper,...
Dispatch from Chicago November 29, 2022
Out from the forests and farms of half-frozen northern Michigan. Rural country here feels different in its pattern of settlement from out in the Far West. There, outside the cities and the suburban zones, rural settlement generally takes place agains...
The Millions Interviews Joe Meno November 10, 2022
Joe Meno’s new novel, Book of Extraordinary Tragedies, is told through the eyes of twentysomething musician Aleks, who is the product of a gifted, exceedingly odd family and—in an especially cruel twist of fate—has lost much of his hearing. Set again...
‘One Step to Chicago’ Review: A Salute to Jazz Greats August 04, 2022
Originally recorded in 1992, this celebratory album finally sees the light, paying tribute to clarinetist Frank Teschemacher and the traditional Chicago sound with two bands featuring Kenny Davern and Dick Hyman alongside many others....
Shakespeare in a Divided America March 06, 2020
Shakespeare’s single explicit reference to America is found in The Comedy of Errors. The two Dromios are anatomizing the unseen ‘kitchen wench’ Nell, who is ‘spherical, like a globe’: ‘I could find out countries in her’, says one Syracusan brother. ‘...
No, Mayors Can't Run the World March 04, 2020
In his new book, The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World, former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel argues that cities are supplanting polarized national capitals. In the years ahead, he believes, urban centers will continue to grow in power an...
The Chicago Police Department's History of Torture March 04, 2020
The Chicago Police Department has been synonymous with all of the very worst excesses of law enforcement culture in the United States for decades, its actions exacerbated by a culture of winking, backslapping, and encouragement from elected officials...
Chicago's Bard of the Downtrodden July 24, 2019
The hour would appear to be right for the resurrection of Nelson Algren (1909–1981), who had been Chicago's premier novelist several years before Saul Bellow rose to eminence, and who made his reputation as the arch-poet of destitution and degradatio...
Growing Up With Murder All Around March 05, 2019
On July 22, 2012, Darren Easterling was murdered in Park Forest, a mostly African-American suburb south of Chicago. Two days later, the local newspaper published a short article, headlined “Man Shot to Death in Park Forest Had Drug, Weapons Convictio...
Lots of Reading and Thinking at the American Writers Museum May 16, 2017
Chicago's new American Writers Museum opens Tuesday, testament to the power of all sorts of written communication....
A Poet's History of Chicago April 23, 2017
Kevin Coval's new collection creates community through history....
