Memo

To: Barack Obama, POTUS
From: Howard Wolinsky, co-author of The Serpent on the Staff: The Unhealthy Politics of the American Medical Association

I hear that you're speaking Monday to the annual meeting of the American Medical Association's policy-setting House of Delegates in Chicago. It's a great idea...

Over the years, I have lunched on occasion at the Standard Club with lawyer friends. I went to a memorial to a friend at the Union League Club of Chicago. And as a reporter, I've covered events at other clubs that blur together.

Private clubs held little interest for me....

Back in the early 1990s, I got a call at the Sun-Times, where I was the medical reporter. On the other end was a familiar squeaky voice.

"I've been following your stories for years in the Sun-Times," the caller said. "Are you the same Howard Wolinsky who went to Bowen...

President-elect Barack Obama is a "motherfucker."

That's the word from no less an authority than Gov. Rod Blagojevich, speaking just after Obama's election last month.

That had to be long after he must have suspected that the feds were recording his conversations. Wonder what he was saying before...

Barack Obama isn't the only one going to Washington.

So is David Axelrod, architect of the Obama victory. The former Chicago Tribune political reporter was Obama's chief campaign strategist and now will become White House senior adviser. The Trib said in effect Axelrod will be Karl Rove to Obama's W.

We're the Second City again.

We lost the ranking as the second largest population center to Los Angeles back in the '80s. We're over it, though we have clung to the Second City label for sentimental reasons. Or maybe we just can't count: the Big Ten Conference has 11 teams.

I first met Ron Davis in 1981. I was the new medical reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times. He was a medical student at the University of Chicago, who hoped to turn the Chicago-based American Medical Association into an anti-tobacco group.

I had just broken a story for the Sun-Times on...

Jonathan Samuels, a distant cousin of mine, a reporter on Sky-TV in the UK, is in Chicago covering the Obama election. He told me in an e-mail: "I think people in the UK are more excited in your election than in our own political situation!" (Check out Jonathan's work at...

During the Vietnam War, I was trying to persuade my South Side draft board to recognize me as a conscientious objector. But they were having none of it.

They sent me to meet with their lawyer in South Chicago. He advised me to forget about being a C.O. and instead...

I knew Studs Terkel when he was a living legend. I was saddened to hear of his death this week at age 96.

I would bump into him on occasion on the Michigan Avenue Bridge or over at the Chicago Sun-Times office, decked out in his rumpled red-checkered shirt and...

My friend Jen pinged me from New York on Facebook to comment on a travel article I had just published on Peru.

But we really were focused back here at home on the Democratic National Convention.

We had just seen Michelle Obama's speech and bioflick on TV. Jen, who...

It was hot and humid, just like back home in Chicago.
But this was London, and I was doing something I would never do back home.
I was waiting on a Saturday morning in late July for Barack Obama with a crowd of his followers, fellow curiosity seekers...