Posted inDonations

Our Favorite Stories of 2018

his year, the South Side Weekly published nearly forty issues containing hundreds of investigations, interviews, op-eds, book reviews, profiles and more. After each production night, our editorial staff jumps into next week’s stories, hunkering down to write, edit, fact-check, illustrate, and layout our next issue. With this constant grind, there’s little time for reflection. We’d […]

Posted inLit

for she wrote

nd She Will is a brief, difficult volume. Only twenty-seven pages, it documents author Kwyn Townsend Riley’s “heal[ing] of self inflicted and reactionary wounds” after trauma. In early 2018, within weeks of each other, Riley gave birth to a stillborn son, her fiance ended their engagement, and she attempted suicide. Her second collection of poems explores […]

Posted inLit

Unerasable

atricia Frazier’s Graphite opens with a quote from fellow poet Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, excerpted from a passage reflecting on the Williams sisters. Rankine says Serena and Venus are “graphite against a sharp white background,” a stark contrast to the accepted homogeneity of professional tennis. In Frazier’s book, her grandmother is given the name […]

Posted inPolitics

The Shots Heard Round the City

 gunshot is fired. Depending on where in the city it is, the sound might not just be picked up by human ears. By early next year, almost 130 square miles of Chicago will be monitored for gunshots by mechanical ears as well, via a technology called ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter sensors—which have already been installed on rooftops […]

Posted inDevelopment

Who Gets to Keep the Gates?

urmurs and greetings circulated through the wood-paneled meeting room of Bryn Mawr Community Church as one hundred South Shore residents settled in for the monthly 5th Ward meeting on May 23. On the evening’s agenda was the first public discussion of a set of ordinances that Alderman Leslie Hairston of the 5th Ward had quietly […]

Posted inNature Issue 2017

When Will Divvy Be For Everyone?

ver the past year, the city’s Divvy bike share program—one of the largest in North America—has added over a hundred stations across the city, dozens of them on the South Side. A year ago, the last time the Weekly reported on Divvy’s service of the South Side, we found that South Siders accounted for just […]