Editor’s Note: At the present moment a small, but passionate group of community members on Chicago’s South Side are well into their third week of a hunger strike aimed at Mayor Rahm Emanuel in an attempt to get him to… Read More ›
Social Justice
Black Protests, White Coverage: How The Mainstream Media Distorts The Uprising in Baltimore
You do not dress for war in order to wage peace. You do not suppress information when you have nothing to hide. You cannot serve & protect a community while you dig your knee into its neck. These would seem… Read More ›
Reasonable Accommodation: The Supreme Court Case That Will Decide Whether Or Not Mentally Ill Lives Matter
There are no surer guarantors of the extraordinary than a story which is prefaced by a explanation of how ordinary things had seemed in its beginning. Ask survivors of the attacks on the World Trade Center or Pearl Harbor to… Read More ›
Mountaineers Are Seldom Free: Union-Busting in the West Virginia Mine Wars
Everything on and about my person had been coated in a thick film of stale tobacco smoke. After 30 days, 10,000 miles and 4 cartons of cigarettes, the air inside the cabin of my car had obtained the same translucence… Read More ›
Detroit’s 73 Story Mid-Life Crisis: How The GM Renaissance Center Embodies The Motor City’s Struggles
I’ve always found it strange that the melting pot is go to metaphor for politicians and public figures looking to expound upon the merits of America’s diverse populous, when all a melting pot does is mix ingredients about until they’re… Read More ›
Portrait of the Hedge Fund Manager as a Young Man
It was once said, by that grand dame of American etiquette Emily Post, that knowing how to properly enter a drawing-room is one of the surest tests of good breeding. As with all matters pertaining to manners, there are very… Read More ›
Fat Tuesdays & Slim Pickins: Talking About Homelessness in New Orleans
With Mardi Gras quickly approaching, I thought it might be appropriate to post a piece I wrote last year about an experience I had with a man who come upon hard times and had reluctantly joined the class of poor unfortunates… Read More ›
But The Hate Remains The Same: Reconstruction & A Changing Of The Guard in Southern Politics
History is not a linear thing. It is not neat, nor is it ramrod straight. It’s beginning is theoretical; its end, unknowable. History—like the rotation of the earth, the orbit of the moon and the life, death and rebirth of… Read More ›
Sins of Omission: The State of the Union & Obama’s Race Problem
Speechmaking has never been Barack Obama’s problem. From the first time the nation heard him as a young state senator from Chicago at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, through the Hope and Change stump speeches on the campaign trail in… Read More ›
When ‘It Gets Better’ Isn’t Enough: Leelah Alcorn & The Struggles of Transgender Youth
Adolescence is a wretched place—a charnel house chock full of freshly formed skeletons waiting to be shoved into closets and strange erogenous urgings that spring up at the most inappropriate moments. It is a time of kinky little hairs that… Read More ›
Virally Suppressed - Muckraking For The Modern World 