news

A few weeks ago the Washington Post sent me to the South Side to cover the first stop of a national tour by the kids of Parkland, Florida. They were in town to sign up voters and connect their experience as victims [...]

Just a few months into 2018 and things have been busy. This Sunday (3/25) the Washington Post will publish a feature I wrote on the Obama Presidential Center. I tell a national audience about the controversy that's been brewing on the South [...]

Happy New Year! (Okay, it's really late January.) The reason for the delay is that things have been busier than usual. In late December, Crain's Chicago Business published my front-page feature that looks into why Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel pulled the plug [...]

A sad news day today for anyone covering the mass shooting in Las Vegas that left nearly 60 people dead and hundreds injured. The Guardian asked that I write a story to provide context into the event itself — A three-day country [...]

Two weeks ago I attended a Cvil War reenactment in the tiny tourist town of Three Oaks, Mich. While this may have been any normal summer weekend in Harbor County, this Civil War reenactment followed the violence in Charlottesville, a weekend that [...]

I'm proud to announce that my essay on early country singer Linda Parker is included in the new edition of RUST BELT CHICAGO: AN ANTHOLOGY, the latest edition from the people at Belt Publishing who have been documenting stories from across the [...]

Music lost the great Glen Campbell yesterday. He was 81 and had just released his final album, the appropriately-titled Adios, in June. My appreciation ran in The Guardian last night and is circulating today. In it, I look at why Campbell was [...]

All week I'm covering the Illinois Playbook for POLITICO. And what a week! Gov. Rauner vetoed a state education bill, July's homicide numbers in Chicago look dismal — And it's only Tuesday. Check it out every morning here. Playbook writer Natasha Korecki [...]

Last month Crain's Chicago Business published my story "Blues is Chicago's most famous cultural export. Why don't we do more to promote it?" a question that has persisted for years, if not decades, in this town. Thankfully, the story received a lot of [...]

January may be a slow month for most industries, but for news in Chicago, things are already heating up. The Washington Post had me on a number of stories this month, starting with a story out the West Side involving a Facebook [...]