A new collaboration with South Side artists Kahari Blackburn and Sulyiman Stokes
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Learning to Play With Fire Again
hen I linked up with Kari “nombreKARI” Thompson and Sam Johnson for the first time, I walked away with private links to unreleased music and they walked away with book recommendations. But what we all walked away with was food for thought, because the conversation that their short film Children Play With Fire sparked was enough […]
Social Security Backlogs Leave Unhoused Populations Vulnerable
or the past six months, Michelle Thomas, a youth case manager at The Night Ministry has been trying to get a new Social Security card for her twenty-two-year-old houseless client. After months of contacting different offices and scheduling an emergency visit to a Social Security Administration (SSA) office that was initially denied, Thomas’s client is […]
Best of South Shore & Woodlawn 2021
Best Corner Best Customer Service Best Win (Worst) Repurposing of a School Best Potential his shared introduction comes at an interesting time when both South Shore and Woodlawn residents might feel that their neighborhoods are in flux. For some, this was probably always the case, but the recent groundbreaking of the Obama Presidential Center has […]
Best of Englewood 2021
Best Samaritan Best Place to Pick Up Diapers Best Garden That Could t was October 1981, and already Chicago-chilly, as my mom and I walked the four blocks to the 79th and Vincennes bus stop to ride to my grandparents’ new home. The first bus rode up Vinncenes past McDonald’s and the famous Fred and […]
Book Review: Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance
ost cultural movements start small: in the bedrooms of budding orators, around the table at a thrifty pub, or in the margins of an artist’s sketchbook. But humble beginnings are foundations nonetheless. Their influence, as history tells us, can grow from four people around a table to 4,000 people across a city—all that’s necessary is […]
We Haven’t Built It Yet
alfway Home: Race, Crime, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration is a book about life on parole, and the wringing circumstances that the incarcerated are sentenced to even after their release. We are often barraged with platitudes about freedom and the pursuit of opportunity—rights bestowed upon us via citizenship in a country which, since its […]
Head vs. Heart
here’s a tension between two of the main characters in The Trial of the Chicago 7 that bubbles throughout the film and is made manifest visually by the contrast in their appearances. Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), draped in Oxford shirts and solid-color ties with a messenger bag at his side, seems to be the polar […]
The Road There Is A Battlefield
lthough Lee Weiner just turned eighty-one on September 7, the cadence and vivacious storytelling of his memoir, Conspiracy to Riot, would have the reader believe he were still in his late twenties organizing in Cabrini-Green and Woodlawn. Weiner was a member of the famed Chicago Eight, a group of organizers who were targeted and tried […]
The Only Constant Is Change: The rifts and connections that bind South Shore together
n one hand, The World Is Always Coming to an End is a collage of stories about author Carlo Rotella’s upbringing on the southeast side of Chicago, and how his neighborhood, South Shore, shaped him and the way he interacts with the wider world. On the other hand, it is a story about community and […]