Maintaining mental health in prison was already challenging before COVID-19 hit.
Category: Columns & Opinion
Posted inOpinion
Chicago doesn’t need more curfews and criminalization
Instead, we need to address the root cause of violence: inequality.
Posted inOn Culture
Flashpoints, free speech, and the law
Last week, amid the usual tsunami of grim news about inflation, mass shootings, pandemic, and war, came word that the New York Court of Appeals is considering whether the Bronx Zoo is violating the rights of Happy, an Asian elephant who’s lived there for more than four decades, by confining her to a portion of […]
Posted inOn Politics
False equivalence
So there I am at my kitchen table, drinking my morning coffee and reading the latest column in the New York Times by Tom Friedman, who I disagree with more often than not. I read pretty much every column by Friedman, Bret Stephens, David Brooks, and other writers with whom I disagree, on the outside […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Frayed nerves because of freysexual ‘lover’
A committed romantic partner can’t have sex with people they love
Posted inOn Politics
MAGA hate
Generally, I like to tell a joke or two in these columns, looking to underscore the absurdity of politics with a little dark humor. But no joking this time. On Saturday, an 18-year-old white supremicist armed with a semiautomatic rifle walked into a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and started shooting people. Black people, […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Bewjeweled butt plugs and the war on abortion
This is a column about worries.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
My wife has ‘new relationship energy’ with her girlfriend
Agreeing to a one-sided open relationship is not the same as agreeing to one-sided polyamory.
Posted inOn Culture
The end of Roe
Regarding the recently revealed U.S. Supreme Court draft ruling on Roe v. Wade: WTF? Because, it’s the F we’re talking about, right? That little itch we’re biologically programmed to scratch and its inordinate, inequitable aftermath? As I’ve opined here before, if cisgender men were the ones carrying a pregnancy for nine months, suffering through an […]
Posted inOn Politics
Footing the bill
In the last few weeks, Mayor Lightfoot has revealed several important details about the casino she’s pushing so hard to develop, including . . . Where it will go—near Chicago and Halsted on the city’s near north side. Who will run it—Bally’s Corporation. And why we need it—to raise money to pay police and firefighter […]
Posted inOn Politics
Whole Foods flight
In the aftermath of Whole Foods closing its taxpayer-subsidized store in Englewood, it’s as good a time as ever for me to once again remind you that it was only four years ago that the city and state were begging Jeff Bezos to please, please, please take billions of our tax dollars and build a […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
My wife wakes up at 3 AM to masturbate
Quickies on topping, whipped cream, and chastity cages
Posted inOn Culture
Chicago’s blessed with a motherlode of stunning churches
What kind of God allows a church to burn down on Good Friday? That’s the question that came to mind when the 130-year-old Antioch Missionary Baptist Church at Stewart and 63rd Street went up in flames earlier this month, followed by a familiar answer: the same god that has allowed slavery, Holocaust, plague, war, and […]
Posted inAnnouncements
The Chicago Reader will be fully nonprofit
It is with excitement that we are able to (finally) announce that the Chicago Reader is transitioning fully to its nonprofit status under the Reader Institute for Community Journalism!
Posted inColumns & Opinion
I put my husband in a sleepsack and play video games
A kinky reader worries about accidental death on “storage nights”