Tag: Chicago

How to Defund the Police

The inconvenient truth of police history in the United States is that police departments were not designed to keep a generic public safe.

What Was Public Housing?

Any debate about American public housing will eventually have to reckon with Chicago. More specifically, it will have to reckon with that city’s wrecked projects. Those closest to the issue have ...

Michelle Obama’s Embrace

I told Michelle Obama that I admired Becoming for its courage, honesty, risk taking, and optimism. But my admiration went further, because in her story I had seen myself, and not just in the book’s main character ...

Toward the Black Girl Future

To read Eve L. Ewing is to read Chicago. Born and raised in the city’s Logan Square neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, Ewing’s love for the city is palpable in ...

“Say Chi City”

If you want to fall wrackingly, despairingly in love with a place, here’s what you do: leave it. When I was young and wintering out my graduate years, marooned in the penitential bleakness of upstate ...

How the Cubs Won

Sports history is made all the time—and most of it consists of phenomena that rank at the level of Trivial Pursuits: x number of homeruns, y number of strikeouts, a few hundredths of a second here ...

Chicago Law

Baltimore has The Wire, Newark, The Sopranos, and for seven seasons Chicago has had The Good Wife. The city with North America’s highest number of annual civilian deaths by cop and its very own ...