Last week I wrote a little about the trial of a Chicago Police Officer named Jason Van Dyke. He shot a 19 year-old named Laquan McDonald 16 times and was charged with first degree murder plus other lesser charges. I included a link to the dashcam video of the killing. I’m not going to include […]

Writers join the memoir-writing classes I lead for all sorts of reasons. Some tell me they want to hone their writing skills, some hope it will improve their memory, others want to publish their work. And so on. None of the writers in my classes have told me they signed up for their first class […]

The SCOTUS nominee hearings play out in Washington while, here in Chicago, the murder trial of a police officer proceeds. In a literal sense, they have nothing to do with each other. To me, though, their juxtaposition speaks volumes about what’s wrong with us. In D.C, a man is about to be given a lifetime […]

There is a lot of drivel on social media and I own up to having contributed my share of it. Usually it’s best to just let stuff go because, really, it evaporates as an issue in hours. (Unless you enjoy some celebrity and some stupid thing you said years ago comes up—but that’s another story.) […]

It’s that time of the year when my working life eats me alive for a couple weeks and occupies the limited space in my head, which means I’m left with not-so-deep thoughts: Here in Chicago I’m happy that we might have a real race for mayor now that Rahm Emanuel has announced he will not […]