It’s a common refrain in the city: Chicago summer is so worth the wait. Newbies and transplants can feel the buzz of opportunity in the air when the weather starts to turn. Visceral summer memories fuel locals through even the coldest, darkest months. And many of those memories involve food and drink—cookouts, summer cocktails, farmers’ […]
Tag: essays
Posted inBlogs
Books we can’t wait to read in 2018
Bill Clinton has written a thriller about a missing president! And nearly 100 other ways to escape the oncoming shit show.
Posted inBlogs
The graphic novel Imagine Wanting Only This turns comics into poetry
Kristen Radtke’s essay in images explores loss, ruins, and restlessness.
Posted inArts & Culture
The natural selection of Jenny Kendler
Jenny Kendler, first-ever artist in residence for the Natural Resources Defense Council, makes complex work about the weird relationship between humans and the natural world.
Posted inMusic
In Rotation: Metro publicist Jenny Lizak on a punk documentary to give teenage girls for Christmas
Current obsessions of Metro publicist Jenny Lizak, and Smart Bar booker Marea Stamper (aka the Black Madonna)
Posted inArts & Culture
Megan Stielstra taps into the anxieties of early adulthood in Once I Was Cool
Megan Stielstra taps into the anxieties of early adulthood in Once I Was Cool, the Columbia College teacher’s new collection of personal essays.
Posted inMusic
David Grubbs on the meaning of records
David Grubbs on why the experimental music of the 1960s was so rarely recorded at the time—and what changes when we listen to it today.
Posted inArts & Culture
The life of Peggy Shinner, as told by her body
Peggy Shinner’s new collection of essays on the body catalogs a lifetime of memories and obsessions.
Posted inArts & Culture
Bitches gotta write
Samantha Irby, the acerbic author of the hyperpopular blog Bitches Gotta Eat, publishes her first book.
Posted inBlogs
Janet Malcolm is a camera
The writer’s new essay collection, Forty-One False Starts, is a knockout.
Posted inArts & Culture
This week’s Culture Vultures recommend:
Chicagoans recommend a quasi-fictional novel, reliably funny improv, and a new literary mag.
Posted inNews & Politics
Funny Girl
Before the kids, writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal was just another subversive chick. Now she picks brain lint in coffeehouses.
Posted inNews & Politics
The Man With the Plan
Faith in our money managers is the new American religion. If Alexander Hamilton has been overlooked, it’s because he was ahead of his time.
Posted inNews & Politics
Elements of Style
The reason Freud never figured out what a woman wants–Was will das Weib?, as he put it–is that he was asking the wrong people. If he’d talked to either Coco Chanel or Diane Von Furstenberg, he’d have learned that what many of us want is something decent to put on in the morning, for a […]