AGAINST LOVE: A POLEMIC Laura Kipnis Pantheon The title of the latest from cultural critic Laura Kipnis’s seems tactically misleading. Romantic love makes a juicy target for a would-be enfant terrible–the apparent ambition of a writer who opens her book with a “Reader’s Advisory” that warns us to “Please fasten your seatbelts: we are about […]
Author Archives: Melissa King
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: Chicago’s hot commodity
Sociologist David Grazian became interested in urban blues clubs soon after arriving here to pursue his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1995. New in town and needing a break from academia, Grazian was drawn out of Hyde Park to the north side by the “nighttime distractions” of clubs like B.L.U.E.S. and Kingston Mines. […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Finding My Religion
To this day I maintain the confused respect for Christianity I acquired in my youth, when out of concern for my reputation as well as my everlasting soul, I began to go to church.
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: Uncle Sam on the skids
Not long after John Lennon’s death in 1980, an earnest 16-year-old from LaGrange named Steve Darnall visited a local forum on gun control. While speaking to a woman legislator, Darnall began to cry, apologizing for becoming so emotional. The woman told him not to be embarrassed, because the world needs more people with strong feelings. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: David Wakler’s mysterious ways
From priest to attorney to mystery novelist–you wouldn’t describe David Walker’s resume as typical. But there is a certain continuity to his vocational history: an interest in language, the study of character, and the truth behind things. Walker mentions one thing that priests and attorneys have in common: both spend their time “dealing with people […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: murders with a familiar ring
Anyone who’s lived in a college dorm–especially a girls’ dorm–will recognize the backdrop of Edith Skom’s newest mystery, The Charles Dickens Murders. Set in the 1940s at the University of Chicago and in the present at “Midwestern University,” a college just outside Chicago (which is not necessarily a certain school in Evanston, Skom says coyly), […]
Posted inNews & Politics
It’s All In The Game
On the court everything comes into focus: the guys I’m up against, the struggle to dominate, the asphalt, the net–and my life.
Posted inNews & Politics
Reader to Reader
I was mugged. All of a sudden, this five-foot-two chick was taking my wallet. Later, I couldn’t even tell the police what she had been wearing, but I remembered her voice, so deep and strange, sort of artificial. Or maybe it was my ears–my hearing may have been thrown off by the circumstances. I tried […]