And so it will happen. This week, powers that be in Chicago will demolish a little work by Mies van der Rohe. A small part of his extraordinarily important campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology will bite the dust.

Another small piece of when Chicago ruled the architecture and...

I read with interest all the stories this week about the late Studs Terkel and his FBI file. To my dismay, they pretended to discover the ironic revelation that Terkel actually applied to work for the FBI in the early 1930s.

I scratched my head, waiting for someone to...

We have been awash with an array of unhappy water stories in this region of late. On the surface they are unrelated ... scary fish ... E. coli contamination ... improperly regulated...

For some reason, the State of Illinois thinks I'm qualified to teach history.

I didn't major in history, or even political science. Though I did take a couple history courses in college, they had titles like, "The History of International Institutions" and "The Hindu Novel in the 20th Century"...

It's always rewarding to see a rock solid painting exhibit by one of Chicago's finest artists. Jim Lutes' exhibition of new work at Valerie Carberry is refreshing after having seen a survey exhibition of his work at the Renaissance Society, which was solid, but by definition, backward...

What's far scarier than the thought of Guantanamo Bay terrorism suspects cooling their heels behind maximum security bars in Thomson, Illinois?

Fear-mongered people -- already stretched to the limits due to the ravages the economy has inflicted -- acting out against anyone who looks like a foreigner because the TV...

Michael Scott was a colleague of mine for 26 years. We first met when my man won and his man lost. My man was Harold Washington, my mentor; his was Richard M. Daley, his mentor.

No matter. After the election, we worked together. Michael doing his part, I doing mine....

The Graduate Employees' Organization (GEO), IFT/AFT Local 6300, AFL-CIO, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has successfully ended a two-day strike against the university administration. The GEO walked out on Monday morning, after nearly seven months of negotiations during which the administration refused to sufficiently guarantee tuition waivers. On...

"Washington's administration broke with the traditional Chicago growth machine on various issues ... [T]he administration killed plans to revitalize Navy Pier and for a World's Fair."

Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography

This is a great book on Chicago. I'll definitely devote a posting or two to its Chicago...

In a word, Michael Scott mattered.

His life was the ultimate world-class success story. Michael was a staunch Westsider who embraced the finer things yet reached back, went back, and, in fact, never left his roots or his commitment to society's invisible ones.

The invisible ones -- the disenfranchised...

The political climate in Illinois is nothing less than a national embarrassment. Last January, we impeached and removed our sitting governor from office. Come next June, he will face trial on charges that will likely lead to imprisonment, making him the fourth of the last seven Illinois governors to go...

Listener Beware: This is what happens when a Republican congressmen stands up Fook and Konkol ... and they have too many of The Champagne of Beers.

A quick 'cast recapping a rather crappy week in Chicago. Da Bears suck, suicide strikes Mayor Daley's inner circle and a Steelers fan claims...

No, I am not suggesting that the world is in the toilet, nor that it belongs there.
I have been reading a fascinating and informative book by Rose George called The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters.

This is where I...

This weekend I attended a seminar on charter schools given by a school director of a highly-regarded charter school on the East Coast. As many charter leaders do, he compared the role of the charter movement in public education to the role of Federal Express in forcing the U.S. Postal...

Last week, Chicago Public Schools officials unveiled a new plan for admitting students to CPS's magnet and selective enrollment programs. In the days ahead, a lot of ink will be spilled and a lot of voices will be heard debating the merits of the plan, because this plan will determine...

The Fighting Illini don't have much fight on the gridiron this year. But the disgraced administrators who perpetrated the "Clout List" scandal had enough fight to win golden parachutes even after they lose their top administrative positions. And now the University administration has allowed a strike of its teaching assistants...

While former Illinois Senator Barack Obama mulls flushing another $40 billion a year in our tax dollars down the toilet in Afghanistan -- that's the estimated annual cost of sending 40,000 more troops for the next several years -- graduate employees at the University of Illinois, a "land grant" public...

On October 27, 2009, the Village Board of the Village of Northbrook approved an ordinance providing for the disposal of surplus police department duty weapons--seventy seventeen-year-old Beretta Centurion 92FS'. They decided to give them away to officers for unrestricted personal use. Under the ordinance, if an officer doesn't want...