When it snows in Chicago, the plows come out quickly and do their jobs well; the city gets an average of 36 inches per year, so the salt truck and plow drivers are rarely caught unprepared. …

The wind was wicked on the open sea; it whipped waves as high as 30 feet. In the middle of the storm was The Freedom, a small yacht that had begun its life closer to a kayak. Through the years, its owner, Jack, had built it, reinforced it, enlarged it…

Darkness fell fast across the wide, white-specked field. Nighttime was always cause for relief there, but on New Year’s Eve, it was cause for celebration. The fading sunlight meant the fire could be lit and the party could begin in the small wooden cabin. In front of the fire, John…

The more I see of national politics, the more this Tweet resonates with me: I’ve also long found humor in Godwin’s Law, which states that, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 100 percent.” …

My brother and I were talking recently about, I guess, Q-Anon, which is, I guess, some sort of online group who believe that Hollywood stars are pizzeria-owning child molesters, and so are all Democrats, and that Donald Trump was sent from God or the Magic Spaghetti Monster to stop them. …

In layman’s terms, my mom died of a blood clot, but there’s much more to it than that — and you need to know about it. First of all, the ability of our blood to clot is both natural and crucial. If our blood didn’t clot, we’d bleed to death…

In the 1960’s, baseball stadiums were built so they could also be football stadiums. Many of them, from Atlanta to Philadelphia to Cincinnati to Pittsburgh, turned out to be generic, spherical bowls, devoid of personality. Busch Stadium II in St. Louis outlasted them all. By the time I was growing…

Since the invasion of the capitol the other day, I’ve heard a lot of doom and gloom on podcasts and social media about the “end of “our” democracy.” That’s not a typo; I put quotation marks around both the whole phrase and the word our. I’ll explain. It’s not our…

I recently read David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. It is, primarily, the story of an IRS employee in Peoria, IL. I’ll let him take it from there: “As many people here remember, in 1977, during high inflation, high deficits, and my second enrollment at DePaul, there was a state…