This past Thursday three Chicago Police Officers, who had clearly lied in the interest of their fellow officer Jason Van Dyke, were acquitted on all counts. I’ve bounced between furious, disappointed, and plain sad since then. That kind of behavior—the same kind that enables horrific behavior in other institutions like the Catholic Church, Penn State, […]

The memoir-writing classes I lead are all on break now, so I have time to file through essays they wrote for our last six-week session and choose some to share with readers here. At Halloween I asked writers in my class at The Admiral at the Lake to use 500 words to answer the question […]

The essays writers bring to our weekly memoir-writing classes teach me a lot about history, geography, and civil rights. Gabriela Freese and her twin sister grew up in South America — their parents had emigrated from Germany to Paraguay during the European depression after World War I. “I grew up in a German household,” she […]

We live in a media driven world. A supply-side scheme where large media outlets, especially cable TV, regardless of perceived political stripes, know how to stretch content to fill time, spread narratives and aggravate the hell out of us. And they know that anger and spectacle somehow keeps bringing us back. They’re in the eyeballs […]

After President George Herbert Walker Bush died Friday, the news has been full of stories about his service during World War II, his responsibilities for the Persian Gulf War, his inabilities to rally the economy during his four years in office, and his 1992 loss to Bill Clinton. One big story missing in all that? […]