Been cogitating on a bunch of stuff since last weekend, which saw hundreds of thousands of Grateful Dead fans come to our neck of the woods. I started on one topic but it sort of got out of control so I’m backing off and am going to keep it short here. The upshot is what […]

Earlier this summer I spoke at a memorial service for a writer in one of the memoir writing classes I lead at Lincoln Park Village. This week a thank-you note arrived from her daughter, and along with the note she included a copy of an essay her mother had written when I assigned “I Have […]

The newfangled treadmills at the gym I go to have TVs attached, and usually, I try to match my appointment with the treadmill with a baseball game. This past Friday, though, there was no baseball while I was working up a sweat. So as I channel surfed, I bumped into coverage of the Wimbledon tennis tournament. […]

Back in college, I took a course called “The History of Communications.” Taught by a Teaching Assistant in the Ph.D. program named Carolyn Marvin (now on the faculty at the Annenberg School at Penn), it was one of those courses that changed the way I looked at things. Forever. The course looked at advances in communications […]

Here in Chicago, the past week started with elation over the Blackhawks winning their third Stanley Cup in six years. But the elation was later  tempered by the news out of South Carolina. I have lots to say about it, too much really, and I’ve found over the past few days that others have said these […]