Author Archives: Neil Elliott

Thanks for “A Year Without Journalism” [December 30] and its elitist response to the blogger and Internet advertising challenge, as if bloggers aren’t journalists too. The same self-serving cries were heard from the monasteries when Gutenberg printed his Bible with movable type. And from the movie industry when television came along. But we’re not going […]

(1) Mike Miner says “intelligent design calls itself a scientific theory, but it can’t be tested” [Hot Type, September 9]. But neither can evolution. When’s the last time you heard of a scientist evolving a chimp to a man? Got you there, Mike. In fact, you might as well throw out the big bang theory […]

Thanks for the piece on jury duty [“A Jury of Whose Peers?” May 13]. I was especially interested in the lofty comments by Chief Judge Timothy Evans that jury duty is a civic duty and that people should serve “irrespective of what the salary is” and therefore not overburden the taxpayers. Well, being a judge […]

Thank you for your brilliant piece on that brilliant and incredibly good-looking new writer, Steve Elliott, who has taken the nation by storm with his brilliant novel Jones Inn [March 26]. (I think his last name is spelled with two t’s.) I’m pretty sure he first left home when he was 14, not 13, but […]

Thank you for Michael Miner’s editorial on the lawsuit over disk jockey Mancow’s irresponsibility [February 26] in which Miner makes the analogy: “The Reader, for example, depends on the submissions of freelancers….It’s one thing to be diligent about the articles they submit–it would be another to have to ask for references and run background checks.” […]

Headline Former state appeals judge Gino DiVito, in his public relations role as flack and apologist for the sorry state of Illinois judiciary, engages in specious sophistry in his criticism of Bob Greene (Hot Type, August 14), and Michael Miner falls for it utterly and as swiftly as any yokel watching the shells moved around […]

elliott.qxd [Re: “Will Development Bury the Barrio?,” April 24] Most liberals believe that a citizen has the right to choose his neighborhood and the neighborhood has no right to exclude him. But apparently this concept is not attractive to the Reader. You seem to think that persons who are better off financially, or who are […]

Thanks to the Reader for the first and only expose of the Hill case, in which the Tribune accused the Hills of feeding their children fried rats and cockroaches, thereby artfully circumventing the arduous nuisance of due process. Though I was surprised to find a liberal paper in opposition to the ancient attempt of the […]

I was astonished to find in Erin Hogan’s piece on the masturbation criminal [October 27] that the state’s attorney, judge, defendant’s attorneys, and arresting University of Chicago and Chicago cops all made an issue of whether or not the U. of C. cop had the right to make an arrest off campus. Thought everyone knew […]

It’s easy to regard Bob Greene as a jerk (“Bobwatch,” January 27). His cynical tearjerking, so obviously calculated to tear-jerk that it doesn’t; his terrible-looking hairpiece, obviously the first he ever owned and Greene too cheap to buy a good one; the way he writes the same column over and over again. It’s easy to […]

To the editors: I was very much interested in your paean to stressed-out syndrome (“When John M. Came Marching Home,” January 17). In which a variety of military guys suffer a variety of psychological problems in the aftermath of the so-called Gulf War. The physical symptom of which is a lot of whining. Nathan Bedford […]

To the editors: Your piece [Neighborhood News, May 11] on the peevish refusal of the Rogers Park Tenants Committee to post safe school signs made them sound like the guy on a raft quarreling about who should throw a line to a sailor overboard surrounded by sharks. And meanwhile the children die. You made them […]

To the editors: I just read the Open Letter addressed to me in your [Letters] column (April 1). Look at their signatures: “Susan Danzig LaPierre” (wasn’t that the author of one of W.C. Fields’ screenplays?), “Kitty Knapp” and so on. Come on, girls, quit your kidding. In addition to their lighthearted, mocking approach to a […]

To the editors: Was very much interested in your article on “Tot Control” [November 13] and behavior modification. However, your article didn’t give any attention to the oldest, most time-honored method of child behavior modification. I refer to a system millions of years old and guaranteed to work 20 times faster than merely ignoring a […]